around the bathroom and found there wasn't a scrap of soap. There
he was, as one might say, au natural, or perhaps better--if one
should include the dripping from his first plunge--one might say
he was au jus! And what is more, he was au mad. He jabbed the bell
button that summoned the valet, and when the boy appeared Henry had
his speech ready for him. "Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty
blame toot sweet about it!" The valet explained that soap was
not furnished with the room. It took some time to get that across
in broken French and English; then Henry, talking very slowly and
in his best oratorical voice, with his foot on the fortissimo,
cried: "Say! We are paying," at the dazed look in the valet's
face Henry repeated slower and louder, "We are paying, I say,
fifteen-dollars--fif-teen dollars a day for these rooms. You go
ask Mrs. Ritz if she will furnish soap for twenty?" And he waved
the valet grandly out.

[Illustration with caption: "Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty
blame toot sweet about it!"]

An hour later we sallied forth to see Paris in war time. Our way
lay through the lonely Vendome, out by the empty Rue Castiglione,
down the Rue de Rivoli. So we came into the great beautiful Place
de la Concorde; and what a wide and magnificent waste it was. Now
and then a wayfarer might be seen crossing its splendid distances,
or a taxicab spinning along through the statuesque grandeur of the
place. But the few moving objects in the white stretch of marble
and cement only accented its lonely aspect. The circle of the
French provinces was as desolate as the Pompeiian Forum, and save
for the bright colours of the banks of flowers that were heaped
upon the monuments to Alsace and Lorraine, the place might have been