ractised. The Frenchwoman leaning in the door of her empty
_boutique_ still wears the smile with which she used to calm the
impatience of crowding shoppers. The seam-stress living on the
meagre pay of a charity work-room gives her day's sewing as
faithfully as if she were working for full wages in a fashionable
_atelier_, and never tries, by the least hint of private
difficulties, to extract additional help. The habitual cheerfulness
of the Parisian workwoman rises, in moments of sorrow, to the finest
fortitude. In a work-room where many women have been employed since
the beginning of the war, a young girl of sixteen heard late one
afternoon that her only brother had been killed. She had a moment of
desperate distress; but there was a big family to be helped by her
small earnings, and the next morning punctually she was back at
work. In this same work-room the women have one half-holiday in the
week, without reduction of pay; yet if an order has to be rushed
through for a hospital they give up that one afternoon as gaily as
if they were doing it for their pleasure. But if any one who has
lived for the last year among the workers and small tradesmen of
Paris should begin to cite instances of endurance, self-denial and
secret charity, the list would have no end. The essential of it all
is the spirit in which these acts are accomplished.

The second question: What are the conditions and qualities that have
produced such results? is less easy to answer. The door is so
largely open to conjecture that every explanation must depend
largely on the answerer's personal bias. But one thing is certain.
France has not achieved her present tone by the sacrifice of any of
her national traits, but rather by their extreme keying up;
therefore the surest way of finding a clue to that tone is to try to
single out whatever distinctively "French" characteristics--or those
that appear such to the envious alien--have a direct bearing on the
present attitude of France. Which (one must ask) of all their
multiple gifts most help the French today to be what they are in
just the way they are?

_Intelligence!_ is the first and instantaneous answer. Many French
people seem unaware of this. They are sincerely persuaded that the
curbing of their critical activity has been one of the most
important and useful results of the war. One is told that, in a
spirit of patriotism, this fault-finding people has learned not to
find fault. Nothing could be mor