nd women, more
representative of the State than the Ministry in power, because they
had long records of public service and united all phases of intellectual
and religious activity in France, organized a system of private charity
to supplement the Government doles, and under the title of the
Secours Nationale, relieved the needs of the destitute with a prompt
and generous charity in which there was human love beyond the
skinflint justice of the State. It was the Secours Nationale which saved
Paris in those early days from some of the worst miseries of the war
and softened some of the inevitable cruelties which it inflicted upon
the women and children. Their organization of ouvroirs, or workshops
for unemployed girls, where a franc a day (not much for a long day's
labour, yet better than nothing at all) saved many midinettes from
sheer starvation.

There were hard times for the girls who had not been trained to
needlework or to the ordinary drudgeries of life, though they toil hard
enough in their own professions. To the dancing girls of Montmartre,
the singing girls of the cabarets, and the love girls of the streets, Paris
with the Germans at its gates was a city of desolation, so cold as they
wandered with questing eyes through its loneliness, so cruel to those
women of whom it has been very tolerant in days of pleasure. They
were unnecessary now to the scheme of things. Their merchandise--
tripping feet and rhythmic limbs, shrill laughter and roguish eyes,
carmined lips and pencilled lashes, singing voices and cajoleries--had
no more value, because war had taken away the men who buy these
things, and the market was closed. These commodities of life were no
more saleable than paste diamonds, spangles, artificial roses, the
vanities of fashion showrooms, the trinkets of the jeweller in the Rue
de la Paix, and the sham antiques in the Rue Mazarin. Young men,
shells, hay, linen for bandages, stretchers, splints, hypodermic
syringes were wanted in enormous quantities, but not light o' loves,
with cheap perfume on their hair, or the fairies of the footlights with all
the latest tango steps. The dance music of life had changed into a
funeral march, and the alluring rhythm of the tango had been followed
by the steady tramp of feet, in common time, to the battlefields of
France. Virtue might have hailed it as a victory. Raising her chaste
eyes, she might have cried out a prayer of thankfulness that Paris
had been cleansed of a