her women have been
called upon to play their important role in war, although never on so
vast a scale as now.

Contrary to the prevailing estimate of the French--an estimate formed
mainly from sensational novels and plays, or during brief visits to
the shops and boulevards of Paris--the French are a stolid, stoical,
practical race, abnormally acute, without illusions, and whose famous
ebullience is all in the top stratum. There is even a certain
melancholy at the root of their temperament, for, gay and pleasure
loving as they are on the surface, they are a very ancient and a very
wise people. Impatient and impulsive, they are capable of a patience
and tenacity, a deep deliberation and caution, which, combined with an
unparalleled mental alertness, brilliancy without recklessness,
bravery without bravado, spiritual exaltation without sentimentality
(which is merely perverted animalism), a curious sensitiveness of mind
and body due to over-breeding, and a white flame of patriotism as
steady and dazzling as an arc-light, has given them a glorious
history, and makes them, by universal consent, preeminent among the
warring nations to-day.

They are intensely conservative and their mental suppleness is quite
as remarkable. Economy is one of the motive powers of their existence,
the solid pillars upon which their wealth and power are built; and yet
Paris has been not only the home and the patron of the arts for
centuries, but the arbiter of fashion for women, a byword for
extravagance, and a forcing-house for a thousand varieties of
pleasure. No race is so paradoxical, but then France is the genius
among nations. Antiquity, and many invasions of her soil have given
her an inviolable solidity, and the temperamental gaiety and keen
intelligence which pervades all classes have kept her eternally young.
She is as far from decadence as the crudest community in the United
States of America.

To the student of French history and character nothing the French have
done in this war is surprising; nevertheless it seemed to me that I
had a fresh revelation every day during my sojourn in France in the
summer of 1916. Every woman of every class (with a few notable
exceptions seen for the most part in the Ritz Hotel) was working at
something or other: either in self-support, to relieve distress, or to
supplement the efforts and expenditures of the Government (two billion
francs a month); and it seemed that I never should see the last of