n
has found herself, they have been brief. Feminism, whether approved by
the great mass of Frenchwomen or not, has done its insidious work. And
for many years now there has been the omnipresent American woman with
her careless independence; and, still more recently, the desperate
fight of the English women for liberty.

It was quite natural when this war swept across Europe like a fiery
water-spout, for the French woman of even the bourgeoisie to come
forth from her shell (although at first not to the same degree as the
noblesse) and work with other women for the men at the Front and the
starving at home. Not only did the racing events of those first weeks
compel immediate action, but the new ideas they had imbibed, however
unwillingly, dictated their course as inevitably as that of the more
experienced women across the channel. The result was that these women
for the first time in their narrow intensive lives found themselves
meeting, daily, women with whom they had had the most distant if any
acquaintance; sewing, knitting, talking more and more intimately over
their work, running all sorts of oeuvres, founding homes for refugees,
making up packages for prisoners in Germany (this oeuvre was conceived
and developed into an immense organization by Madame Wallestein),
serving on six or eight committees, becoming more and more
interdependent as they worked for a common and unselfish cause; their
circle of acquaintances and friends as well as their powers of
usefulness, their independent characteristics which go so far toward
the making of personality, rising higher and higher under the impetus
of deprisoned tides until they flowed gently over the dam of the
centuries; the flood, be it noted, taking possession of wide pastures
heretofore sacred to man.

Naturally these women spent very little time at home; although, such
is the incomparable training of those practical methodical minds, even
with a diminished staff of servants the domestic machinery ran as
smoothly as when they devoted to it so many superfluous hours.

And with these new acquaintances, all practically of their own class,
they talked in time not only of the war and their ever augmenting
duties, but, barriers lowered by their active sympathies, found
themselves taking a deep interest in other lives, and in the things
that had interested other women of more intelligence or of more
diversified interests than their own.

Insensibly life changed, quite apart