roblem ends. But it is an altogether different matter
with the women of the leisure classes. The industrial women who have
proved so competent in the positions occupied for centuries by men
merely agitate the economic brain of France, but the future of the
women of the upper strata of the bourgeoisie is shaking the very soul
of the social psychologist.

II

At the outbreak of the war hundreds of girls belonging to the best
families volunteered as nurses. Some quickly retired to committee work
in disgust, or because their pampered bodies rebelled under the
strain.

Others have never faltered, doing the most repulsive and arduous work
day by day, close to the thunder of guns, or under the constant menace
of the taube whose favorite quarry is the hospital full of ill and
wounded, and of pretty women whose torn bodies even in imagination
satisfy the perversities of German lust; but if they ever go home to
rest it is under the peremptory orders of their medecin major, who has
no use for shattered nervous systems these days.

While these girls may have lost their illusions a little earlier than
they would in matrimony, the result is not as likely to affect the
practical French mind toward the married state as it might that of the
more romantic and self-deluding American or English woman. There is
little doubt that they will marry if they can, for to marry and marry
early has been for too many centuries a sort of religious duty with
well-born French women to be eradicated by one war; and as they will
meet in hospital wards many officers who might not otherwise cross
their narrow paths, their chances, if the war ends soon enough, will
be reasonably increased.

Moreover, many a man who was a confirmed bachelor will, after the
acute discomfort of years of warfare, look upon the married state as a
greater reward than the medals on his breast; and on the other hand
many girls will be glad to marry men old enough to be a parent of the
young husband they once dreamed of; for hardly since the Thirty
Years' War will men when peace comes be so scarce and women so many.

There has even been talk from time to time of bringing the Koranic law
across the Mediterranean and permitting each able-bodied Frenchman of
any class to have three registered wives besides the one of his
choice, the additional expense and responsibility being borne by the
State.

But of all the countries in Europe polygamy is most unthinkable in
France. Th