s already in possession of Bourg. Madame Dugas was a
woman of endless resource. Like many another woman in this war the
moment her executive faculties, long dormant, were stirred, that
moment they began to develop like the police microbes in fevered
veins.

She had visited that convent. She knew that its great walls sheltered
long rooms and many of them. It would make an ideal hospital and she
determined that a hospital it should be.

There was but one recourse. The Pope. Would she dare? People wondered.
She did. The Pope, who knew that wounded men cannot wait, granted the
holy nuns a temporary dispensation from their vows; and when I walked
through the beautiful Convent of the Visitation with Madame Dugas,
Madame Goujon, and M. Loiseau, there were soldiers under every tree
and nuns were reading to them.

Nuns were also nursing those still in the wards, for nurses are none
too plentiful in France even yet, and Madame Dugas had stipulated for
the nuns as well as for the convent.

It was a southern summer day. The grass was green. The ancient trees
were heavy with leaves. Younger and more graceful trees drooped from
the terrace above a high wall in the rear. The sky was blue. The
officers, the soldiers, looked happy, the nuns placid. It was an oasis
in the desert of war.

I leave obvious ruminations to the reader.

When I met Madame Dugas, once more I wondered if all Frenchwomen who
were serving or sorrowing were really beautiful or if it were but one
more instance of the triumph of clothes. Madame Dugas is an infirmiere
major, and over her white linen veil flowed one of bright blue,
transparent and fine. She wore the usual white linen uniform with the
red cross on her breast, but back from her shoulders as she walked
through the streets with us streamed a long dark blue cloak. She is a
very tall, very slender woman, with a proud and lofty head, a profile
of that almost attenuated thinness that one sees only on a
Frenchwoman, and only then when the centuries have done the chiseling.
As we walked down those long, narrow, twisted streets of Bourg between
the high walls with the trees sweeping over the coping, she seemed to
me the most strikingly beautiful woman I had ever seen. But whether I
shall still think so if I see her one of these days in a Paris
ballroom I have not the least idea.

Madame Dugas runs three hospitals at her own expense and is her own
committee. Like the rest of the world she expected the war