t only does that dreary and dangerous region
exert a sinister fascination but that it seems to expel fear from
your composition. It is as if for the first time you were in the
normal condition of life, which during the centuries of the ancestors
to whom you owe your brain-cells, was war, not peace.

IX

MADAME WADDINGTON

I

One has learned to associate Madame Waddington so intimately with the
glittering surface life of Europe that although every one knows she
was born in New York of historic parentage, one recalls with something
of a shock now and then that she was not only educated in this country
but did not go to France to live until after the death of her father
in 1871.

This no doubt accounts for the fact that meeting her for the first
time one finds her unmistakably an American woman. Her language may be
French but she has a directness and simplicity that no more identifies
her with a European woman of any class than with the well-known
exigencies of diplomacy. Madame Waddington strikes one as quite
remarkably fearless and downright; she appears to be as outspoken as
she is vivacious; and as her husband had a highly successful career as
a diplomatist, and as his debt to his brilliant wife is freely
conceded, Madame Waddington is certainly a notable instance of the gay
persistence of an intelligent American woman's personality, combined
with the proper proportion of acuteness, quickness, and charm which
force a highly conventionalized and specialized society to take her on
her own terms. The greater number of diplomatic women as well as
ladies-in-waiting that I have run across during my European or
Washington episodes have about as much personality as a door-mat. Many
of our own women have been admirable helpmates to our ambassadors, but
I recall none that has played a great personal role in the world. Not
a few have contributed to the gaiety of nations.

Madame Waddington has had four separate careers quite aside from the
always outstanding career of girlhood. Her father was Charles King,
President of Columbia College and son of Rufus King, second United
States Minister to England. When she married M. Waddington, a
Frenchman of English descent, and educated at Rugby and Cambridge, he
was just entering public life. His chateau was in the Department of
the Aisne and he was sent from there to the National Assembly. Two
years later he was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, and in
January, 187