there is a tremendous power still resident
in the prestige, organizing ability, social influence, tireless
energy, and self-sacrifice of the disdained aristocracy.

During the war oeuvres have been formed on so vast a scale that one
sees on many committee lists the names of noblesse and bourgeois side
by side. But it is a defensive alliance, bred of the stupendous
necessities of war, and wherever possible each prefers to work without
the assistance of the other. The French Army is the most democratic in
the world. French society has no conception of the word, and neither
noblesse nor bourgeoisie has the faintest intention of taking it up as
a study. There is no active antagonism between the two classes--save,
to be sure, when individual members show their irreconcilable
peculiarities at committee meetings--merely a profound indifference.

II

Mlle. Javal, although living the usual restricted life before the war,
and far removed from that section of her class that had begun to
astonish Paris by an unprecedented surrender to the extravagancies in
public which seemed to obsess the world before Europe abruptly
returned to its normal historic condition of warfare, was as highly
educated, as conversant with the affairs of the day, political,
intellectual, and artistic, as any young woman in Europe. But the war
found her in a semi-invalid condition and heartbroken over the death
of her mother, whom she had nursed devotedly through a long illness;
her girlhood intimacies broken up not only by the marriage of her
friends, but also by her own long seclusion; and--being quite
French--feeling too aged, at a little over thirty, ever to interest
any man again, aside from her fortune. In short she regarded her life
as finished, but she kept house dutifully for her brother--her only
close relation--and surrendered herself to melancholy reflections.

Then came the war. At first she took merely the languid interest
demanded by her intelligence, being too absorbed in her own low
condition to experience more than a passing thrill of patriotic
fervor. But she still read the newspapers, and, moreover, women in
those first anxious days were meeting and talking far more frequently
than was common to a class that preferred their own house and garden
to anything their friends, or the boulevards, or even the parks of
Paris, could offer them. Mlle. Javal found herself seeing more and
more of that vast circle of inherited friends as well as