ance.

She is certainly one of its towering personalities and if she does not
stand out at the end of the war as Woman and Her Achievements
personified it will be because she has the defects of her genius. Her
restless ambition and her driving energy hurl her headlong into one
great relief work after another, until she has undertaken more than
any mere mortal can carry through in any given space of time. She is
therefore in danger of standing for no one monumental work (as will be
the happy destiny of Mlle. Javal, for instance), although no woman's
activities or sacrifices will have been greater.

It may be imagined that such a woman when she started a newspaper
would be in a position to induce half the prominent men and women in
France either to write for it or to give interviews, and this she did,
of course; she has a magnificent publicity sense. The early numbers of
_La Vie Feminine_ were almost choked with names known to "tout Paris."
It flourished in both branches, and splendid offices were opened on
the Avenue des Champs Elysees. Women came for advice and employment
and found both, for Mlle. Thompson is as sincere in her desire to help
the less fortunate of her sex as she is in her feminism.

II

Then came the War.

Mlle. Thompson's plans were formed in a day, her Committees almost as
quickly. _La Vie Feminine_ opened no less than seven ouvroirs, where
five hundred women were given work. When the refugees began pouring in
she was among the first to ladle out soup and deplete her wardrobe.
She even went to the hastily formed hospitals in Paris and offered her
services. As she was not a nurse she was obliged to do the most
menial work, which not infrequently consisted in washing the filthy
poilus wounded after weeks of fighting without a bath or change of
clothing. Sometimes the dirt-caked soldiers were natives of Algiers.
But she performed her task with her accustomed energy and
thoroughness, and no doubt the mere sight of her was a God-send to
those men who had for so long looked upon nothing but blood and death
and horrors.

Then came the sound of the German guns thirty kilometers from Paris.
The Government decided to go to Bordeaux. Mlle. Thompson's father
insisted that his daughter accompany himself and her mother. At first
she refused. What should she do with the five hundred women in her
ouvroirs, the refugees she fed daily? She appealed to Ambassador
Herrick. But our distinguished representative