he American army was not much bigger compared with
the European nations in arms, but it would grow.

Polly came home well charged with electricity, the new-woman idea that
was claiming half of the war, the true squaw-spirit that takes up the
drudgery at home while the braves go out to swap missiles with the
enemy. When Marie Louise said that she, too, had come to Washington to
get into harness somewhere, Polly promised her a plethora of
opportunities.

At luncheon Polly was reminded of the fact that a photographer was
coming over from Washington. He had asked for sittings, and she had
acceded to his request.

"I never can get photographs enough of my homely self," said Polly.
"I'm always hoping that by some accident the next one will make me
look as I want to look--make ithers see me as I see mysel'!"

When the camera-man arrived Polly insisted that Marie Louise must
pose, too, and grew so urgent that she consented at last, to quiet
her. They spent a harrowing afternoon striking attitudes all over the
place, indoors and out, standing, sitting, heads and half-lengths,
profile and three-quarters and full face. Their muscles ached with the
struggle to assume and retain beatific expressions on an empty soul.

The consequences of that afternoon of self-impersonation were
far-reaching for Marie Louise.

According to the Washingtonian custom, one of the new photographs
appeared the following Sunday in each of the four newspapers. The
Sunday after that Marie Louise's likeness appeared with "Dolly
Madison's" and Jean Elliott's syndicated letters on "The Week in
Washington" in Sunday supplements throughout the country. Every now
and then her likeness popped out at her from _Town and Country_,
_Vogue_, _Harper's Bazaar_, _The Spur_, what not?

One of those countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who
had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some
time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in
an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a Colonial
drawing-room.

He hurried to his wife with the picture, and she called it "Mamise"
with a recrudescent anguish of doubt.

"She's in this country now, the paper says," said Jake. "She's in
Washington, and if I was you I'd write her a little letter astin' her
is she our sister."

Mrs. Nuddle was crying too loosely to note that "our." The more Jake
considered the matter the less he liked the thought of waiting for