Dearest Family:—

You see I am being good this week and not neglecting you as I did two weeks ago. I still get embarrassed when I think of that time. We are hearing all sorts of rumors about no boats going for thirty days, but there is no reason to believe them any more than the many other rumors we hear all the time, so I shall keep on writing, anyway, and nowadays I make a carbon copy of each letter that I send. It does not take any longer, and it seems to me to be well worth while.

Things are about the same here. Very busy. We have finally secured the storehouse and are moving into it this week. The present plan is to have all our reserve stock there, and have only just enough on the shelves to meet the demands during the week. The car will go to the storehouse once or twice a week, and get the necessary things. In this way we will have much more room in the vestiaires themselves, and it will be easier to handle more people. We have just taken stock of our food-supply and find to our joy that it is considerably larger than we realized. This means that we can enlarge that department, and with Rootie there it will be splendid, I think. I hate to let it go at all, and am going just the same Tuesday afternoons, but I know that it will soon be impossible for me to give up that much time. We hope to move ten families a week. This will mean pretty close calculations on time for all of us.

It is wonderful to feel that I may be able to be of some real use to some one for the first time in my life. I have not felt so strong and well and so well equipped for a winter as I do now, for a long time. We have laid in a supply of coal and wood, and are as cozy as can be. I am letting many little petty time-taking jobs slide along to some one else, and am just saving myself for the furniture above everything else. That sounds as if I was not doing any hard work. I truly am. We moved all the things from the store we call Maggi, and which is on Ernest Cresson, a little farther down, over to the rue Daguerre storehouse, and I can tell you it was some job for all of us—piling the things in the car, and then unloading at the other end. Gay Kimberly’s husband returned suddenly, so I had to run the car, as Rootie was out calling with a Red Cross man who wants to know the conditions of refugees living in Paris. (By the bye, a Maxwell car with a starter has been given us. I wish it was a Ford, on account of essence, but we must not be fussy, I suppose.)

This morning Rootie started for church early, and got a bath with a friend of hers who lives in a hotel which still has its hot water on Saturday and Sunday! I was, therefore, alone for the morning, and after the washing was counted and put away, and the salon tidied, and the pillows, which had raveled, had been sewn, I decided that I was going to pretend I was at home; so I got dressed as if for Sunday dinner at 378. I put on a nice waist and my pink sweater with the gray collar, which I made myself, and my earrings, and Aunt Sarah’s ring. It was really lots of fun. I imagined what I would be doing if I was at home, and who would be there too. Rootie could not imagine what had struck me when she came in and found me all dressed up.

I wonder if it would interest you to hear what we did for one family in the way of moving? Rogeau is the name. We have had them on our cards for quite a long time. It is a small family, a tuberculous man and his wife and little boy. We have been boarding the woman and child out in the country, while the man was in the hospital. This summer the woman came in to see us to ask if we could possibly let her have another month out in the country. We were fortunately able to do so, and when her husband came out of his hospital, he joined her in Saint-Prix, where she was boarding, and together they have found a little house at twenty-two francs a month, for the house and garden. They will each have separate rooms to sleep in, and the woman is most careful about cleaning and all that. Owing to our being able to give them the meubles, they were able to take the house at once, and last week I took out to them a table, two chairs, one stool, plates, knives, forks, spoons, a stove, basin, pail, dishtowels, pitcher, sheets, covers,—and extra nice light warm ones for the man,—pillow-cases, casserole, carpet, bathtowels, coffeepot, small pillow for man, refuse pail, coat-hangers, table-cover, and candle and candlestick (having sent three single beds by express). With these few things they can begin to live, and then they will gradually get more. The man has a little forge in an out house in the garden where he works, and has a chair in the sun. He mends pails and pans. I am giving him a chaise-longue with Daddy’s money, so that he can rest in between spells of work. I am so hoping that the air and sun will rebuild him as they have others. You would have been as touched as I was at their joy at the few things we brought them. You see they are really beginning to have their home together again. This is only one of so many interesting cases. Having no income except from the little work he does, they are not paying us anything for the things, although lots of other families are paying. If it is possible, it is so much better for them to pay something.

We are worried just now as to what we are going to do for stoves. There is a great shortage. And the way prices jump up from one week to another!! We calculated two weeks ago that every move costs us well over five hundred francs, with the beds. Now they are much more. Everything goes up two to three francs a week. Beds cost ninety francs for a double lit cage, with mattress and two pillows, where they used to be only seventy last spring. Single beds are fifty-nine instead of thirty-two. Stoves used to be fifteen to twenty-five francs new, and now we pay thirty for old ones and seventy for the new ones. Next week they are to be fifty per cent more, I was told. Lessiveuses are thirty-five, and we have had to give them up, although I hope to change that, and give the few big things and no small things,—forks and knives and all that,—for a family can, after all, save and buy those things, and they never would be able to get either a buffet or lessiveuse. Mrs. H—— pays twenty-five to thirty-five francs for a secondhand buffet now, and she used to get a big, tall, new one for twenty-five. All the small things are about a franc more, pails and all such. Linen is terribly dear. Fortunately, we still have some unbleached linen from America for the sheets. When it goes, I don’t know what we will do. They want nine francs apiece for the most slimsy cotton sheets here. I do not quite see what is going to happen if things keep on getting more and more expensive. What will stop it all? And I suppose Germany is richer than ever with her latest gains in Russia. What is going to happen?

Rootie says it is time to go to bed, and I guess she is right. Lots and lots of love.