t.

Into this feeling, ten days ago, came the news of the destruction of
the Lusitania.

We got the news here on the 8th. It struck me dumb.

For two or three days I kept quietly in the house. I believe the people
about me expected the States to declare war in twenty-four hours. My
neighbors who passed the gate looked at me curiously as they
greeted me, and with less cordiality as the days went by. It was as if
they pitied me, and yet did not want to be hard on me, or hold me
responsible.

You know well enough how I feel about these things. I have no
sentimentality about the war. A person who had that, and tried to live
here so near it, would be on the straight road to madness. If the world
cannot stop war, if organized governments cannot arrive at a code of
morals which applies to nations the same law of right and wrong
which is enforced on individuals, why, the world and humanity must
take the consequences, and must reconcile themselves to the belief
that such wars as this are as necessary as surgical operations. If one
accepts that point of view--and I am ready to do so,--then every
diabolical act of Germany will rebound to the future good of the race,
as it, from every point of view, justifies the hatred which is growing up
against Germany. We are taught that it is right, moral, and, from
every point of view, necessary to hate evil, and, in this 20th century,
Germany is the most absolute synonym of evil that history has ever
seen. Having stated that fact, it does not seem to me that I need say
anything further on the subject.

In the meantime, I have gone on imitating the people about me. They
are industriously tilling their fields. I continue cutting my lawn,
planting my dahlias, pruning my roses, tying up my flowering peas,
and watching my California poppies grow like the weeds in the fields.

When I am not doing that, with a pot in one hand, and the tongs in
the other, I am picking slugs out of the flower-beds and giving them a
dose of boiling water, or lugging about a watering-pot. I do it
energetically, but my heart is not in it, though the garden is grateful all
the same, and is as nice a symbol of the French people as I can
imagine.

We have the dragoons still with us. They don't interest me hugely--not
as the English did when they retreated here last September, nor as
the French infantry did on their way to the battlefield. These men
have never been in action yet. Still they lend a picturesqueness t