econd, and whose wife received allocation
amounting to more than her husband's former earnings. It was some time
after the war began that the rule was made exempting from service
every man with more than six children. When it did go into effect the
fathers of large flocks hastened home, anticipating a joyful reunion.
But the wife of this man, at least, received him with dismay and
ordered him to enlist--within the hour.

"Don't you realize," she demanded, "that we never were so well off
before? We can save for the first time in our lives and I can get a
good job that would not be given me if you were here. Go where you
belong. Every man's place is in the trenches."

There is not much romance about a marriage of that class, nor is there
much romance left in the harried brain of any mother of thirteen.

III

Exasperating as those women were who preferred to live with their
children on the insufficient allocation, it is impossible not to feel
a certain sympathy for them. In all their lives they had known nothing
but grinding work; liberty is the most precious thing in the world and
when tasted for the first time after years of sordid oppression it
goes to the head. Moreover, the Frenchwoman has the most extraordinary
faculty for "managing." The poorest in Paris would draw their skirts
away from the slatterns and their dirty offspring in our own tenement
districts.

One day I went with Madame Paul Dupuy over to what she assured me was
one of the poorest districts of Paris. Our visit had nothing to do
with the war. She belonged to a charitable organization which for
years had paid weekly visits to the different parishes of the capital
and weighed a certain number of babies. The mothers that brought their
howling offspring (who abominated the whole performance) were given
money according to their needs--vouched for by the priest of the
district--and if the babies showed a falling off in weight they were
sent to one of the doctors retained by the society.

The little stone house (situated, by the way, in an old garden of a
hunting-lodge which is said to have been the _rendezvous de chasse_ of
Madame du Barry), where Madame Dupuy worked, with an apron covering
her gown and her sleeves rolled up, was like an ice-box, and the naked
babies when laid on the scales shrieked like demons. One male child, I
remember, sat up perfectly straight and bellowed his protest with an
insistent fury and a snorting disdain at all attem