those relief organizations of infinite variety known as "oeuvres."

Some of this work is positively creative, much is original, and all is
practical and indispensable. As the most interesting of it centers in
and radiates from certain personalities whom I had the good fortune to
meet and to know as well as their days and mine would permit, it has
seemed to me that the surest way of vivifying any account of the work
itself is to make its pivot the central figure of the story. So I will
begin with Madame Balli.

II

To be strictly accurate, Madame Balli was born in Smyrna, of Greek
blood; but Paris can show no purer type of Parisian, and she has never
willingly passed a day out of France. During her childhood her brother
(who must have been many years older than herself) was sent to Paris
as Minister from Greece, filling the post for thirty years; and his
mother followed with her family. Madame Balli not only was brought up
in France, but has spent only five hours of her life in Greece; after
her marriage she expressed a wish to see the land of her ancestors,
and her husband--who was an Anglo-Greek--amiably took her to a hotel
while the steamer on which they were journeying to Constantinople was
detained in the harbor of Athens.

Up to the outbreak of the war she was a woman of the world, a woman of
fashion to her finger-tips, a reigning beauty always dressed with a
costly and exquisite simplicity. Some idea of the personal loveliness
which, united to her intelligence and charm, made her one of the
conspicuous figures of the capital, may be inferred from the fact that
her British husband, an art connoisseur and notable collector, was
currently reported deliberately to have picked out the most beautiful
girl in Europe to adorn his various mansions.

Madame Balli has black eyes and hair, a white skin, a classic profile,
and a smile of singular sweetness and charm. Until the war came she
was far too absorbed in the delights of the world--the Paris world,
which has more votaries than all the capitals of all the world--the
changing fashions and her social popularity, to have heard so much as
a murmur of the serious tides of her nature. Although no one disputed
her intelligence--a social asset in France, odd as that may appear to
Americans--she was generally put down as a mere _femme du monde_,
self-indulgent, pleasure-loving, dependent--what our more strident
feminists call parasitic. It is doubtful if she belonged