The French army is the one perfect democracy in the world. Its men,
from duke to peasant-farmer, have a contemptuous impatience for social
pretense when about the business of war, and recognition is swift and
practical. As the young men of the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie
have lost more and more of their old friends they have replaced them
with men they like for good masculine reasons alone, and these they
have taken to bringing home, when permissionnaires at the same time.
Nothing can be more certain than that girls, once haughty and
exacting, will marry these young men and be glad to get them.

A student of his race said to me one day: "France is the most
conservative country in Europe. She goes on doing the same thing
generation after generation paying no attention to rebellious mutters,
hardly hearing them in fact. She believes herself to have been moulded
and solidified long since. Then, presto! Something sudden and violent
happens. Old ideas are uprooted. New ones planted. Is there a
struggle? Not for a moment. They turn an intellectual somersault and
are immediately as completely at home with the new as the old."

During the second year of the war a feminist was actually invited to
address the graduation class of a fashionable girls' school. She told
them that the time had come when girls of all classes should be
trained to earn their living. This war had demonstrated the
uncertainty of human affairs. Not a family in France, not even the
_haute finance_, but would have a curtailed income for years to come,
and many girls of good family could no longer count on a dot if the
war lasted much longer. Then there was the decrease in men. Better go
out into the world and make any sort of respectable career than be an
old maid at home. She gave them much practical advice, told them that
one of the most lucrative employments was retouching photographs, and
implored them to cultivate any talent they might have and market it as
soon as possible.

The girls sat throughout this discourse as stunned as if a bomb had
dropped on the roof. They were still discussing it when I left Paris.
No doubt it is already beginning to bear fruit. Few of them but have
that most dismal of all fireside ornaments, a half-effaced old-maid
sister, one of the most tragic and pitiable objects in France. The
noble attributes which her drab and eventless life sometimes leave
un-withered were superbly demonstrated to the American audience so