h with her.
My first formal dinner in France was a pleasant surprise. It was like a
great family party--not dull and quiet like the English dinner, and ever
so much more fun. Everybody participated. If there was one lion at the
table, everybody shared him.

[Illustration: p060.jpg MY FIRST FORMAL DINNER IN FRANCE]

There is something in being born on a silken couch. Nothing surprises
you. You are at ease anywhere in the world. Eve fitted into Paris as
naturally as in her native London, I began to feel at home there myself.
It was a city of happy people--care free, natural, sympathetic. There
was a lack of restraint which, after the oppressive dignity of London,
was a rare treat. No one was critical. Every one accepted my halting
and faulty French without ridicule or condescension. The amiability and
the friendliness of the French people thawed my heart and began to lift
me out of my slough of homesickness. Happiness came back to me.

There had been hours in England when only the knowledge that a woman's
rarest gift was coming to me, and that Tom was proud and happy about it,
kept me from running away--back to the simple life of my own United
States.

I was homesick for mother. Babies were a mystery to me, although I had
helped mother with all of hers. We had buried three of them in homemade
coffins--pioneering is a ruthless scythe, and only the fit survive. I
began to understand my mother and the glory in the character which never
faltered, although she was alone and life had been hard. How could I
whine when I had Tom and a good friend--and life was like a playground?

I loved the French. They regard life with a frankness which sometimes
shocked my reserved Boston husband. He never accepted intimacy. The
restraint of old England was still in his blood. The free winds of the
prairie had swept it from mine.

My new friends in Paris discovered my happy secret. It was my
all-absorbing thought, and I was delighted to be able to discuss it
frankly. Motherhood is the great and natural event in the life of a
woman in France, and no one makes a secret of it. I was very happy in
Paris. And then--Tom had to go to Vienna.

Not even Tom, Eve, and the promised baby could make me happy there. In
all the world I had seen no place where the line of class distinction
was so closely drawn, where social customs were so rigid and court forms
so sacred, as at the Austrian capital. Learning the social customs