Adam's draft board, Aron's disappointment

Adam and Lee follow the western front on a pinned map, and when Mr. Kelly dies Adam is appointed to the draft board. He works at it hard and sadly, unable to shake the sense that every young man he passes is under sentence of death, and grows sterner because he knows himself weak. Henry Stanton tells him to relax and follow the rules, then blunders into the thing Adam has not said: what he would do if his own sons came before him. Adam answers that he would resign, not because he might reject them but because he could not let his own go free. Walking home he asks Lee whether they are responsible when a boy they send is killed, and asks for the word again — timshel, thou mayest. Meanwhile Aron is wretched at Stanford, where he had expected robed students converging on a white temple and found sandstone in a hayfield. He moves to a furnished room, rebuilds his family in memory, and writes Abra letters of purified longing that make her uneasy.

Adam finally has work that suits his conscience and it is the work of sending other men's sons to be killed, a joke the book makes without pointing at it. Timshel is recalled in its plainest form, as an answer to a practical question. Aron's cure for a disappointing university is another unexamined picture — the ranch in the evening, with Abra installed in it.