k. They did. I can
actually see them grow. I am almost afraid to tell you that they are
over two feet high now. Of course you won't believe me. But it is not
a fairy tale. I would not have believed it myself if I had not seen it.

Alas! I find that I cannot break myself of reading the newspapers, and
reading them eagerly. It is all the fault of that nasty affair in
Servia. I have a dim recollection that I was very flippant about it in
my last letter to you. After all, woman proposes and politics upset her
proposition. There seems to be no quick remedy for habit, more's the
pity. It is a nasty outlook. We are simply holding our breaths here.

July 30,1914.

This will be only a short letter--more to keep my promise to you than
because I feel in the mood to write. Events have broken that. It
looks, after all, as if the Servian affair was to become a European
affair, and that, what looked as if it might happen during the Balkan
War is really coming to pass--a general European uprising.

It is an odd thing. It seems it is an easy thing to change one's
environment, but not so easy to change one's character. I am just as
excited over the ugly business as I should have been had I remained near
the boulevards, where I could have got a newspaper half a dozen times a
day. I only get one a day, and this morning I got that one with
difficulty. My "Figaro," which comes out by mail, has not come at all.

Well, it seems that the so-called "alarmists" were right. Germany has
NOT been turning her nation into an army just to divert her population,
nor spending her last mark on ships just to amuse herself, and keep
Prince Henry busy.

I am sitting here this morning, as I suppose all France is doing, simply
holding my breath to see what England is going to do. I imagine there
is small doubt about it. I don't see how she can do anything but fight.
It is hard to realize that a big war is inevitable, but it looks like
it. It was staved off, in spite of Germany's perfidy, during the Balkan
troubles. If it has to come now, just imagine what it is going to mean!
It will be the bloodiest affair the world has ever seen--a war in the
air, a war under the sea as well as on it, and carried out with the most
effective man-slaughtering machines ever used in battle.

I need not tell you--you know, we have so often talked about it--how I
feel about war. Yet many times since I came to France to live, I have
felt as if