e of those beautiful trees beyond my window, over whose tops I
used to gaze at the airplanes darting about on the lookout for taubes,
was an incubator. I exhausted the resources of two chemist shops in
Passy and one in Paris. I tried every invention, went to bed reeking
with turpentine, and burned evil-smelling pastiles. Mlle. Jacquier
came in every night and slew a dozen with a towel as scientifically as
she did everything else. All of no avail. At one time I was so spotted
that I had to wear a still more heavily spotted veil. I looked as if
afflicted with measles.

Oddly enough the prettiest of the students, whose first name was
Alice, was the only one of us all ignored by the mosquitoes. She had
red-gold hair and a pink and white skin of great delicacy, and she
might have been the twin of Elsie Ferguson. A few of the other girls
were passably good-looking but she was the only one with anything like
beauty--which, it would seem, is practically confined to the noblesse
and grande bourgeoisie in France. Next to her in looks came Mlle.
Jacquier, who if she had a dot would have been snapped up long since.

Alice had had two fiances (selected by her mother) and both young
officers; one, an Englishman, had been killed in the first year of the
war. She was only eighteen. At one time the northern town she lived in
was threatened by the Germans, and Mrs. Vail of Boston (whose daughter
is so prominent at the American Fund for French Wounded headquarters
in Paris), being on the spot and knowing how much there would be left
of the wildrose innocence that bloomed visibly on Alice's plump
cheeks, whisked her off to London. There she remained until she heard
of Mlle. Thompson's School, when Mrs. Vail brought her to Paris. As
she was not only pretty and charming but intelligent, I exerted myself
to find her a place before I left, and I believe she is still with
Mrs. Thayer in the Hotel Cecilia.

VII

The Ecole Feminine, I am told, is no more. Mlle. Thompson found it
impossible to raise the necessary money to keep it going. The truth
is, I fancy, that she approached generous donators for too many
different objects and too many times. Perhaps the Ecole will be
reopened later on. If not it will always be a matter of regret not
only for France but for Valentine Thompson's own sake that she did not
concentrate on this useful enterprise; it would have been a definite
monument in the center of her shifting activities.

I have no s