pts to placate him
that betokened the true son of France and a lusty long-distance
recruit for the army. All the children, in fact, although their
mothers were unmistakably poor, looked remarkably plump and healthy.

After a time, having no desire to contract peritonitis, I left the
little house and went out and sat in the car. There I watched for
nearly an hour the life of what we would call a slum. The hour was
about four in the afternoon, when even the poor have a little leisure.
The street was filled with women sauntering up and down, gossiping,
and followed by their young. These women and children may have had on
no underclothes: their secrets were not revealed to me; but their
outer garments were decent. The children had a scrubbed look and their
hair was confined in tight pigtails. The women looked stout and
comfortable.

They may be as clean to-day but I doubt if they are as stout and as
placid of expression. The winter was long and bitter and coal and food
scarce, scarcer, and more scarce.

IV

The two classes of women with whom Madame Goujon and her friends have
most difficulty are in the minority and merely serve as the shadows in
the great canvas crowded with heroic figures of French women of all
classes who are working to the limit of their strength for their
country or their families. They may be difficult to manage and they
may insist upon working at what suits their taste, but they do work
and work hard; which after all is the point. Madame Goujon took me
through several of the ouvroirs which her society had founded to teach
the poor widows--whose pension is far inferior to the often brief
allocation--a number of new occupations under competent teachers.

Certainly these young benefactors had exercised all their ingenuity.
Some of the women, of course, had been fit for nothing but manual
labor, and these they had placed as scrub-women in hospitals or as
servants in hotels or families. But in the case of the more
intelligent or deft of finger no pains were being spared to fit them
to take a good position, or, as the French would say, "situation," in
the future life of the Republic.

In a series of rooms lent to the society by one of the great
dressmakers, I saw keen-looking women of all ages learning to retouch
photographs, to wind bobbins by electricity, to dress hair and fashion
wigs, to engrave music scores, articulate artificial limbs, make
artificial flowers, braces for wounded arms and l