re given a dush and first shock, from which they never
wholly recovered because of many subsequent similar experiences.

The office building was arranged much on the order of a Chinese
restaurant; in that as you journeyed skyward conditions improved. The
ground floor was the worst, but as the elevator ascended you met with
more courtesy and consideration. By the time you passed the fourth
floor the man behind the desk had time to answer a relevant question, as
he was not riled by his own incompetency.

After they had been in New York a day or two they learned that their
passports had not been issued and therefore there was no immediate
prospect for sailing. They were then ordered to a training conference
for ten days, which many attended for months, retaining their rooms and
eating at an expensive hotel at the expense of Mrs. O'Flannagan.

At the conference, with the exception of lessons in the language of the
country where they were to be located and the physical training given
them, to many the time seemed wasted. They were subjected to daily
lectures on morals and patriotism by professors who talked to them as to
a group of fourth-grade boys, and sought to impress upon them that it
would be unbecoming in a Y secretary to flirt with the girls of the
street of Paris and London, or to lie around drunk in a front-line
trench. But the professors could not help it; they were fifty and their
habits were formed. They had been talking to boys from eight to sixteen
years old for thirty years. They could not understand that a lawyer or
dentist or preacher past forty might be a little set in his ways and
might know almost half as much about the girls of the street and a plain
drunk as a Boston college professor. The pupil might even have had the
experience.

Possibly some of the men before sailing during their hundred nights on
Broadway received a few instructions first-hand about the girls of the
street and the evils of intemperance, which in a small measure prepared
their innocent souls for the shock of a short sojourn in Paris.
Certainly that experience with what the professors had told them was
sufficient to keep them from unconsciously being led astray, though I
have been told that some of them offered the new and heretofore
unheard-of excuse: "She did tempt me and I did eat."

Then they were further trained to march and to sing; since when they
landed upon foreign shores they undoubtedly would spend most of their
time