these things impress you, as they come to you
day by day.

There isn't any formal social life now--no dinners, no parties. A
few friends dine with a few friends now and then very quietly. The
ladies of fashion are hospital nurses and Red Cross workers, or
they are collecting socks and blankets for the soldiers. One such
woman told your mother to-day that she went to one of the
recruiting camps every day and taught the young fellows what
colloquial French she could. Every man, woman, and child seems to
be doing something. In the ordinary daily life, we see few of them:
everybody is at work somewhere.

We live in a world of mystery: nothing can surprise us. The rumour
is that a servant in one of the great families sent word to the
Germans where the three English cruisers[74] were that German
submarines blew up the other day. Not a German in the Kingdom can
earn a penny. We're giving thousands of them money at the German
Embassy to keep them alive. Our Austrian Embassy runs a soup
kitchen where it feeds a lot of Austrians. Your mother went around
there the other day and they showed that they thought they owe
their daily bread to her. One day she went to one of the big houses
where the English receive and distribute the thousands of Belgians
who come here, poor creatures, to be taken care of. One old woman
asked your mother in French if she were a princess. The lady that
was with your mother answered, "Une Grande Dame." That seemed to do
as well.

This government doesn't now let anybody carry any food away. But
to-day they consented on condition I'd receive the food (for the
Belgians) and consign it to Whitlock. This is their way of keeping
it out of German hands--have the Stars and Stripes, so to speak, to
cover every bag of flour and of salt. That's only one of 1,000
queer activities that I engage in. I have a German princess's[75]
jewels in our safe--$100,000 worth of them in my keeping; I have an
old English nobleman's check for $40,000 to be sent to men who have
been building a house for his daughter in Dresden--to be sent as
soon as the German Government agrees not to arrest the lady for
debt. I have sent Miss Latimer[76] over to France to bring an
Austrian baby eight months old whose mother will take it to the
United States and brin