and submission. The
French are the acutest people in the world. By this time these
preternaturally keen men in the War Office knew me better than I knew
myself. If I had, however unconsciously and in my deepest recesses,
harbored a treacherous impulse toward the country I so professed to
admire and to desire to serve, or if my ego had been capable of sudden
tricks and perversions, they would long since have had these
lamentable deformities, my spiritual hare-lip, ticketed and docketed
with the rest of my dossier.

As it was they complied with my request at once, gave me their
blessing, and escorted me to the head of the stair--no elevators in
this great Ministere de la Guerre and the Service de Sante is at the
top of the building. I went away quite happy, more devoted to their
cause than ever, and easy in my mind about Bordeaux--where, by the
way, my trunks were not opened.

Therefore, that remarkable experience in France is altogether still so
vivid to me that to write about it reportorially, with the personal
equation left out, would be quite as impossible as it is for me to
refrain from execrating the Germans. When I add that during that visit
I grew to love the French people (whom, in spite of many visits to
France, I merely had admired coolly and impersonally) as much as I
abominate the enemies of the human race, I feel that the last word has
been said, and that my apology for writing what may read like a
memoir, a chronicle of personal reminiscences, will be understood and
forgiven.

G.A.

=THE LIVING PRESENT=

I

MADAME BALLI AND THE "COMFORT PACKAGE"

One of the most striking results of the Great War has been the
quickening in thousands of European women of qualities so long dormant
that they practically were unsuspected. As I shall tell in a more
general article, the Frenchwomen of the middle and lower bourgeoisie
and of the farms stepped automatically into the shoes of the men
called to the colors in August, 1914, and it was, in their case,
merely the wearing of two pairs of shoes instead of one, and both of
equal fit. The women of those clearly defined classes are their
husbands' partners and co-workers, and although physically they may
find it more wearing to do the work of two than of one, it entails no
particular strain on their mental faculties or change in their habits
of life. Moreover, France since the dawn of her history has been a
military nation, and generation after generation