notion that one of the sisters had run away and that the
other sister had left town with somebody for somewhere sometime after.
But that was all that the cupboard of her recollection disclosed.

Anatole France has a short story of Pilate in his old age meeting his
predecessor as Proconsul in Jerusalem. During their senile gossip the
elder asks if Pilate had known a certain beauty named Mary of Magdala.
Pilate shakes his head. The other has heard that she took up with a
street-preacher called Jesus from the town of Nazareth. Pilate
ponders, shakes his head again, and confesses, "I don't remember
him."

It was not strange, then, that Marie Louise's people, who had made
almost no impression on the life of the town, should have lapsed from
its memory. But it was discouraging. Marie Louise felt as much of an
anachronism as old Rip Van Winkle, though she looked no more like him
than an exquisite, fashionable young woman could look like a
gray-bearded sot who has slept in his clothes for twenty years.

Her private detective, Larrey, homesick for New York, was overjoyed
when she went back, but she was disconsolate and utterly detached from
life. The prodigal had come home, but the family had moved away.

She took a comfortable little nook in an apartment hotel and settled
down to meditate. The shops interested her, and she browsed away among
them for furniture and clothes and books.

Marie Louise had not been in her homeless home long when the President
visited Congress and asked it to declare a state of war against
Germany. She was exultant over the great step, but the wilful few who
held Congress back from answering the summons revealed to her why the
nation had been so slow in responding to the crisis. Even now, after
so much insult and outrage, vast numbers of Americans denied that
there was any cause for war.

But the patience of the majority had been worn thin. The opposition
was swept away, and America declared herself in the arena--in spirit
at least. Impatient souls who had prophesied how the millions would
spring to arms overnight wondered at the failure to commit a miracle.
The Germans, who had prepared for forty years, laughed at the new
enemy and felt guaranteed by five impossibilities: that America should
raise a real army, or equip it, or know how to train it, or be able to
get it past the submarine barrier, or feed the few that might sneak
through.

America's vast resources were unready, unwieldy, unknow