modern equipment on the ranch. He went hunting with the men,
played games with the children, visited the little district schoolhouse,
and found joy in buying gifts for the youngsters. When mother made a
big platter full of taffy, he pulled as enthusiastically as a boy. As I
stood at the corral, one day, and watched Tom with my youngest brother,
I remembered him at the court of St. James, and I began to understand.

Tom was natural. It was just a part of him to be kindly and gracious to
everybody. I had never seen him angry with men of his own type, but I
saw him furious enough to commit murder when a man on the ranch tied up
a dog and beat her for running away. In after years I saw Tom angry
with men of his own class; I saw him waging long, bitter fights against
public men who had betrayed public trust. Something barbaric in me was
satisfied that my kind, gently bred man was one with the men of my own
tribe, who fought man and beast and the elements to take civilization
farther west.

Almost a generation slipped by between that visit to the West and the
next scene in my life of which I shall write. Many things of personal
and of national importance happened meantime, but they have nothing to
do with this message to women. I was in France when the World War
began. I had been in Vienna again, and in England at regular intervals.
I had learned to accept life as I found it, and to get much joy out of
living. Sometimes I chafed a little under the demands of social life
and needless formalities, but I accepted them as inevitable.

Then the world was torn in two. The earth dripped in blood and sorrow.
Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental. I
was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and
Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great
statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business. I
was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed
to see. As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony
had died with the youth of France. King, generals, statesmen met as
human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling
to find a way out of the hell into which they were falling.

Twice the king rose to his feet, and no one else stood. They were all
too deep in the terrible question of war.

When the meeting was over and the guests of the house ready to retire,
the littl