Never was Paris so disconcertingly odd. And yet never was it more
profoundly itself. Between the slow realisation of a monstrous peril
escaped and the equally slow realisation of its power to punish, the
French spirit, angered and cold, knows at last what the French spirit
is. And to watch and share its mood is positively ennobling to the
stranger. Paris is revealed under an enchantment, On the surface of
the enchantment the pettinesses of daily existence persist queerly.

Two small rooms and a kitchen on a sixth floor. You could put the
kitchen, of which the cooking apparatus consists of two gas-rings, in
the roots of the orange-tree in the Tuileries gardens. Everything is
plain, and stringently tidy; everything is a special item, separately
acquired, treasured. I see again a water-colour that I did years ago
and had forgotten; it lives, protected by a glazed frame and by the
pride of possession. The solitary mistress of this immaculate home
is a spinster sempstress in the thirties. She earns three francs a
day, and is rich because she does not spend it all, and has never
spent it all. Inexpressibly neat, smiling, philosophic, helpful, she has
within her a contentious and formidable tiger which two
contingencies, and two only, will arouse. The first contingency
springs from any threat of marriage. You must not seek a husband
for her; she is alone in the world, and she wants to be. The second
springs from any attempt to alter her habits, which in her sight are
as sacredly immutable as the ritual of an Asiatic pagoda.

Last summer she went to a small town, to which is attached a very
large military camp, to help her sister-in-law in the running of a cafe.
The excursion was to be partly in the nature of a holiday; but,
indefatigable on a chair with a needle, she could not stand for hours