nvitation to a street-car
conductors' dance turned out work of a Grecian perfection, while Marie
Louise bit her lips and blushed with shame under the criticisms of her
teacher. She was back in school again, the dunce of the class, and
abject discouragements alternated with spurts of zeal.

In the mean while the United States was also learning the rudiments of
war and the enormous office-practice it required. Before the war was
over the army of 118,000 men and 5,000 officers in February, 1917,
would be an army of over 3,000,000, and of these over 2,000,000 would
have been carried to Europe, half of them in British ships; 50,000 of
these would be killed to Russia's 1,700,000 dead, Germany's 1,600,000,
France's 1,385,000, England's 706,200, Italy's 406,000, and Belgium's
102,000. The wounded Americans would be three times the total present
army. Everybody was ignorant, blunderful. Externally and internally
the United States was as busy as a trampled ant-hill.

Everything in those days was done in drives. The armies made drives;
the financiers made drives; the charities made drives. The world-heart
was never so driven. And this was all on top of the ordinary human
suffering, which did not abate one jot for all its overload. Teeth
ached just as fiercely; jealousy was just as sickly green; empires
crackled; people starved in herds; cities were pounded to gravel; army
after army was taken prisoner or slaughtered; yet each agitated atom
in the chaos was still the center of the tormented universe.

Marie Louise suffered for mankind and for herself. She was lonely,
love-famished, inept, dissatisfied, and abysmally ashamed of her
general ineffectiveness. Then one of Washington's infamous hot weeks
supervened. In the daytime the heat stung like a cat-o'-nine-tails.
The nights were suffocation. She "slept," gasping as a fish flounders
on dry land. After the long strain of fighting for peace, toiling for
rest, the mornings would find Marie Louise as wrecked as if she had
come in from a prolonged spree. Then followed a day of drudgery at the
loathly necessities of her stupid work.

Detail and delay are the tests of ambition. Ambition sees the
mountain-peak blessed with sunlight and cries, "That is my goal!" But
the feet must cross every ditch, wade every swamp, scramble across
every ledge. The peak is the harder to see the nearer it comes; the
last cliffs hide it altogether, and when it is reached it is only a
rough crag surrounde