ho was infirm and almost imbecile.

She had four children, but they were hindrances rather than helps.
The eldest of them was about eight years old. She did the whole work
of the farm herself. I used to hear her getting up at 4 a.m.,
lighting a fire and opening doors. Peeping through the
half-transparent pane of glass in my tiny window, I saw her tending
her horse and cows before 5 a.m. She worked on, and worked hard, all
day.

The French have not had to face the difficulty of the "one-man
business" as we have, because the women of the minor bourgeoisie are
willing and able to step straight into their husbands' places and
carry on. I learnt that when I lived in towns. The French can go
farther in calling up the men who work the land, because their
peasant women can do the work of men. The land suffers, I suppose,
and the harvests are poorer than in peace time. But if farms in
England were left manless as those French farms are, the result would
be much more serious in spite of the gallant efforts of the girls who
"go on the land."

M. and I tramped about that country a great deal while I was with
him. We saw the same things everywhere, cattle well cared for and
land well worked by a few old men and women who looked old long
before their time.

Our landlady cannot have been an old woman. Her youngest child was a
baby in a cradle, but she looked fifty or more. Loss of youth and
beauty is a heavy price for a woman to pay for anything. I wonder if
she resented having to pay it. At least she has the satisfaction of
knowing that she bought something worth while though she paid dearly.
She kept her home. She fed her children. As surely as her husband in
the trenches she helped to save her country.

I have been assured that the French women have not been so successful
as English women in the conduct of war charities. They have not
rushed into the hospitals to nurse the wounded with anything like the
enthusiasm and devotion of our V.A.D.'s. In the organisation of War
Work Depots and the dispatching of parcels to prisoners of war the
French women have proved themselves on the whole less efficient than
English women. They have not shone in the management of public
business, where Englishwomen have been unexpectedly able and devoted.

On the other hand French women seem to have done better than English
women in the conduct of their private affairs. This, I think, is true
both of the bourgeois and peasant classes. In England