l wants are
reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of the
department store? Even allowing for the immense, the perpetual
buying of supplies for hospitals and work-rooms, the incessant
stoking-up of the innumerable centres of charitable production,
there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments
except the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, however
suffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the long
run, and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to
shop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the
teo-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively (and economically)
to concerts--but the swinging doors of the department stores suck
her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions.

No one, in this respect, would wish the look of Paris to be changed.
It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again,
even though the sight is less interesting than that of the other
crowds streaming daily--and on Sunday in immensely augmented
numbers--across the Pont Alexandre III to the great court of the
Invalides where the German trophies are displayed. Here the heart of
France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes
into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs
face to face with the long triple row of German guns. There are few
in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a
blow; there are personal losses, lacerating memories, bound up with
the sight of all those evil engines. But personal sorrow is the
sentiment least visible in the look of Paris. It is not fanciful to
say that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired
a new character. The change seems to have affected the very stuff it
is moulded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human
clay into some dense commemorative substance. I often pass in the
street women whose faces look like memorial medals--idealized images
of what they were in the flesh. And the masks of some of the
men--those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and a
little satyr-like--look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt
and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces
reveals a personal preoccupation: they are looking, one and all, at
France erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparing
different widths of Valenciennes at the lace-counter all have
something