years' nursing, and her people in the old home town. Bit by bit,
we picked out her status from the things she dropped inadvertently.
And that night in our rooms we assembled the parts of the puzzle
thus; one rambling Bedford limestone American castle in the Country
Club district; two cars, with garage to match; a widowed mother, a
lamented father who made all kinds of money, so naturally some of
it was honest money; two brothers, a married sister; a love for
Henry James, and Galsworthy; substantial familiarity with Ibsen,
Hauptman, Bergsen, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Freud, Tschaikovsky, and
Bernard Shaw; a whole-hearted admiration for Barrie; and a record
as organizer in the suffrage campaign which won in her state three
years ago, plus a habit of buying gloves by the dozen and candy
in five pound boxes! We could not prove it, but we agreed that she
probably bossed her mother and that the brothers' wives hated her
and the sister's husband loved her to death! She was one of those
socially assured persons in the Old Home Town who are never afraid
of themselves out of it! She confessed that she had seen more
or less of the Gilded Youth, before he left for Verdun, and in a
pyrotechnic display of dimples, she admitted that she had gone to
the station to bid the Young Doctor good-bye. She had been assigned
to a hospital near the Verdun sector, and was going out the following
day. When we left her at the door of the Hotel Vouillemont, we
plunged back into the encircling gloom of the French language with
real regret.

As we went further into the life about us, we felt that all the men
were in uniform and all the women in mourning. The French mourn
beautifully. France today is the world's tragedy queen whose
suffering is all genuine, but all magnificently done. In the shop
windows of the Boulevards, and along the Avenue of the Opera are