shook his head. He had
trouble enough on his hands. The more beautiful young women who
removed themselves from Paris before the Boche entered it the simpler
would be the task of the men forced to remain. It was serious enough
that her even more beautiful sister had elected to remain with her
husband, whose duties forbade him to flee. Go, Mademoiselle, and go
quickly.

Mlle. Thompson yielded but she made no precipitate flight. Collecting
the most influential and generous members of her Committees, she
raised the sum needed for a special train of forty cars. Into this she
piled the five hundred women of her ouvroirs and their children, a
large number of refugees, and an orphan asylum--one thousand in all.
When it had steamed out of Paris and was unmistakably on its way to
the South she followed. But not to sit fuming in Bordeaux waiting for
General Joffre to settle the fate of Paris. She spent the three or
four weeks of her exile in finding homes or situations for her
thousand helpless charges, in Blanquefort, Lourdes, Bayonne,
Marseilles, Bordeaux and other southern cities and small towns,
forming in each a Committee to look out for them.

III

Soon after her return to Paris she conceived and put into operation
the idea of an Ecole Hoteliere.

Thousands of Germans and Austrians, employed as waiters or in other
capacities about the hotels, either had slunk out of Paris just before
war was declared or were interned. Even the Swiss had been recalled to
protect their frontiers. The great hotels supplied the vacancies with
men hastily invited from neutral countries, very green and very
exorbitant in their demands. Hundreds of the smaller hotels were
obliged to close, although the smallest were, as ever, run by the wife
of the proprietor, and her daughters when old enough.

But that was only half of the problem. After the war all these hotels
must open to accommodate the tourists who would flock to Europe. The
Swiss of course could be relied upon to take the first train to Paris
after peace was declared, but the Germans and Austrians had been as
thick in France as flies on a battlefield, and it will be a generation
before either will fatten on Latin credulity again. Even if the people
of the Central Powers revolt and set up a republic it will be long
before the French, who are anything but volatile in their essence,
will be able to look at a Boche without wanting to spit on him or to
kick him out of the way as one w