I was tucking the children into bed after their bath, my rosy, romping, noisy children, when "le soldat Deschamps" was announced. Deschamps is the man from the north of France, who had been a coal-miner before the war, the man whose wife and little boy are still "up there," the man who has not seen his family since he kissed them the fourth of August three years ago.

A veil seemed to drop between me and the faces of my rosy, romping, noisy children....

I went slowly along the hall to our living-room. Yes there he was, poor Deschamps, the big, powerfully built fellow, a little thinner, a little more gaunt, a little whiter than when I had seen him last, although that was only a week ago. He rose up, very tall in his worn gray-blue uniform, not so neatly brushed as it had been, and put out a flaccid hand. "Bonsoir, madame ... excuse me for coming again so soon. I know I ought not to take your time. But when we are allowed to go out ... where shall I go? I know so few people in Paris" ... as though one would not be willing to give time when there is so tragically nothing else to give him!

I say something cordial, take up my sewing, and settle myself for what I know is coming. Poor Deschamps! He needs only a word or two of sympathy when out he pours it all in a rush, the heartsick desolation of the uprooted exile, the disintegrating misery of the home-loving man without a home. Of late, alas! it does not come out very coherently. "You see, madame, we were so well off there. What could a man ask for more? My day in the mine began at four in the morning, but I was free at two in the afternoon, and I am very strong, as you see, so that I could go on working out of doors as long as the daylight lasted. We had our own house paid for, our own! And a big, big garden. I earned ten francs a day cash in the mines, and we almost lived out of our garden, so we were saving all the time. Our boy was to have a good schooling. Perhaps, we thought, he might be like Pasteur. You know his father was a simple tanner. My wife never had to work for others, never! She could stay there and have everything clean and pleasant and take care of the boy. We were so happy and always well.... We both worked in the garden, and people who garden are never sick. And always contented. And our garden ... you ought to see it ... all the potatoes we could eat I raised there, and early ones too! And all the cabbages and some to sell. The coal company sold us cheap all the manure we wanted from their stables, and I could make the land as rich, as rich! Such early vegetables! Better than any you can buy in the towns. And the winter ones ... you should see how we protect our cabbages in the winter...."

The monologue has carried the big fellow out of his chair now. He is grasping an imaginary spade, a heap of imaginary cabbages by his side. "So ... we sprinkle sand first, and then cabbages all laid so ... you understand...." The voice goes on and on, almost the voice of a person hypnotized.

I lose my perception of what he is saying as I gaze at his sunken eyes fixed on homely, much-loved scenes I cannot see.

"The best place for the carrots was the sloping bit of ground near the big oak...." He sees it, his big oak, there before him. He makes me see it, and what it meant to him. This was the man whom the twentieth century forced to march away, to kill, and be killed.

"... And little Raoul used to help; yes, with his little hands he would pat down the sand and laugh to see his finger-marks."

The voice stops abruptly. In the resultant silence I move uneasily.... I find Deschamps' talk heartbreaking enough, but his silences terrify me. I try to arouse him from his bleak brooding reverie....

"You had hares too, didn't you, and hens, and a pig...? That must have helped out with the living."

He comes to himself with a start. "Oh, it was my wife who kept the animals. She has such a hand for making them thrive. They were like her other children. Those little chicks, they never died, always prospered, grew so fat. We always had one or two to sell when she went to town to market. AngÈle used to dress them herself, so that we could have the feathers. Then she put them in one of the neat baskets she made from the willow sprouts on the side of our little stream, with a clean white cloth over them, as clean as her neckerchief. AngÈle is as neat as a nun, always. Our house shone with cleanness ..." He breaks off abruptly. "I have shown you the photograph of AngÈle and Raoul, haven't I, madame?"

I hold out my hand and gaze again, as I have so many times before, into the quiet eyes of the young peasant woman with the sturdy little boy at her side. "She is very pretty, your wife," I say, "and your little boy looks so strong and vigorous."

"I hear," he said with a great heave of his broad chest, now so sunken, "that the Boches have taken all the livestock away from the owners, all the hens and pigs and hares, and sent them to Germany. Perhaps Raoul and AngÈle have not enough to eat ... perhaps there is even no house there now ... a cousin of mine saw a refugee from his own region ... who had seen the place where his house had been!... it had been shelled, there was ..." His mouth sets hard in an angry line of horror.

I bestir myself. This is the sort of talk Deschamps must not be allowed.

"M. Deschamps," I say, "I shall be writing soon to that group of American friends who gave the money for your articulated arm. Have you any message to send them? I think they are planning to send some more money to help you...."

He waves it away with a great gesture. "Money can't do anything for me," he says bitterly, adding quickly: "Not of course that I am not very, very grateful for the so-costly artificial arm. It means I can earn their living again, if ever AngÈle...."

I break in once more: "But I promised them a statement of all your case, you know, the dates and places and everything. Could you just run over them again...?"

But I do not listen as he goes wearily over the old story as familiar to me now as to him: mobilized the first day, was in the Battle of the Marne, advanced to B——, was wounded there in the leg, taken to a hospital in an American ambulance, cured, returned to the trenches; wounded in the shoulder, taken to the hospital, cured, returned to the trenches ... all this time with no news whatever from his family, knowing that his region was occupied by the invaders, hearing stories of how the women and children were treated.... Fought during the winter of 1914-15, wounded in three places in June, 1915, taken to the hospital where his arm was amputated. While there, heard indirectly that his wife and child were still alive. As soon as the articulated arm (paid for out of my blessed fund of American money) allowed him to work, he had begun to learn the tinner's trade, since a one-armed man could no longer be a miner. Now he had passed his apprenticeship and could soon be ready to earn his living.

I knew all this laborious, heroic, commonplace story already, and looked through it at the hospital pallor on the haggard face, at the dreadful soft whiteness of the hands so obviously meant to be hard and brown, at the slack looseness of the great frame, at a man on the point of losing his desire to live....

"What use is it to earn money when not a cent can I send to them up there, when I can hear nothing from AngÈle beyond that line on a post-card once in three months? Madame, you have education, why will they not allow a wife to write to her husband?"

I have only the old answer to the old question: "We suppose they are afraid of spies, of people sending information to France."

"But why do they keep AngÈle there? Why don't they let women go to their husbands? What harm can that do? Why do they make it a hell on earth for them and then refuse to let them go?"

I had for this only the usual murmur: "A few are allowed to come away."

He struck his hands together. "So few! When they last said they would allow some women and children to come to France, only a fifteenth part of those who asked for leave were allowed to come. Why? Why? What has AngÈle to do with the war?"

He gets up for the restless pacing about our little living-room which always ends his visits. "I think I shall go mad, madame. I am there in the hospital, two hundred of us in one great room ... oh, they are kind enough to us, we have enough to eat. But we are not children. It is not enough to have food and a roof. Two hundred men there ... what a life ... for fourteen months! Nothing to work for, nothing to live for, no home, no family, not even a chance to go back to the trenches. The other men drink as much as they can get money for. I never drank in my life. Madame, do you suppose it would make me sleep to drink?"

"See here, M. Deschamps," I say, moving to my desk, "I will write again to the Spanish Embassy. I will tell them again about AngÈle and Raoul, they will send the request to the German authorities in your town ... perhaps this time ..." It is a perilous stimulant to administer to a sick heart, but what other have I? So I sit, swallowing the lump in my throat, and once more make out the application which never has any result.

"There," I say, putting it into an envelope with hands that are not very steady—"there, my friend, you mail that. And now you must go, or the night-nurse will scold you for being late."

He reaches for his cap, his old shabby cap with the bullet hole through it, and stands fumbling with it, his head hanging. He towers above me, gaunt, powerful, as pitiably defenseless as any little child. I wink back the tears which threaten to come, shake his hand hard, and tell him to be sure to come again the next time he has the "cafard". He nods absently and shuffles to the door. "You will pardon me, madame ... but when I think that my little Raoul has perhaps not enough to eat, and I am not ..."

He has gone his lonely way to the hospital bed which is all he has for home. I go back to the cool dark bedroom and look down at my sleeping children.

There is no reason for it ... why should I feel guilty to see them rosy and safe?

II

When I come in from the street, very tired, after a talk with a war-widow about ways and means for taking care of her children, I find him in the living-room, the hearty, broad-faced fellow, smiling, giving me his great, farm-laborer's hand, thanking me for the last package of goodies ... as though he had not just come through the inferno of the attack at M——. "The package never arrived at a better moment," he said gaily. "We had been on awfully short rations for three days ... in a shell-hole, you know." I know that I do not know it all, but it is futile to try to draw fine distinctions with Groissard, cheeriest and simplest of "permissionnaires," always the same, always open-faced and clear-eyed, always emanating quiet confidence and always seeing it about him. If there are any tired or disheartened or apprehensive or perplexed soldiers in the army, they pass unperceived of Groissard's honest eyes. His companions are all ... to hear him talk ... as brave, as untroubled, as single-hearted as he. They never complain—that is, if Groissard's account of them is accurate: they think as little as possible about anything but food and packages from the rear and jokes. And when they do think, it is always only to be sure that everybody must hold hard and stick it out quite to the end. As long as "they" are on French soil, of course there is nothing else for an honest Frenchman to do. And they are all honest Frenchmen around Groissard.

"Oh yes, madame," he says simply, balancing my little boy on his knee, "the spirit of the army is excellent. Why shouldn't it be? We're going to get them, you know. And you ought to see our regimental fireless cookers now. They're great! The cooks fill them up at the kitchen at the rear, quite out of range, you know, where there's no danger of a shell upsetting the pots, and then the men bring the big fireless cookers up on mitrailleuse carriages that can go anywhere. They worm their way clear up to us in the first-line trenches, and our ragoÛt is piping hot. It's like sitting down to the table at the farm at home. There's nothing so good for the spirit of an army as hot rasta. And your packages, the packages madame sends with the money from her American friends ... why, the days when they come it's like being a kid again, and having a birthday! And then we get two days out of five for rest at the rear, you know, except when there is a very big attack going on. We're not so badly off at all!"

"During those big attacks aren't you sometimes cut off from food supplies?" I ask.

"Oh, not so often. The longest one was three days and four nights, and we had our emergency rations for half that time." He tosses my fat little son up in the air and catches him deftly in his great farm laborer's hands, butcher's hands. The children adore Groissard, and his furloughs are festivals for them. As for me, I have an endless curiosity about him. I can never be done with questioning him, with trying to find out what is underneath his good-natured acceptance of the present insane scheme of the universe; I sometimes descend to banalities, the foolish questions schoolgirls ask. I lower my voice: "Groissard, did you ever—have you ever had to ... I don't mean firing off your rifle at a distant crowd, I mean in close quarters...?"

"Have I killed many Boches, you mean, madame?" he breaks through my mincing, twentieth-century false-modesty about naming a fact I accept ... since I accept Groissard! "Oh yes, a good many. We fought all over Mort-Homme, you know; and we were in the last attack on Hill 304. There was a good deal of hand-to-hand work there, of course." He turns the delighted baby upside down and right-side up, and smiles sunnily at the resultant shrieks of mirth.

I try again: "Do you see many prisoners, Groissard?" He is always ready to answer questions, although he cannot understand my interest in such commonplace details.

"Yes indeed, madame, ever so many. Just the day before this 'permission' began, day before yesterday it was, we brought in a squad of twenty from a short section of trench we had taken. I'm not likely to forget them for one while! Our cook, who is from the South and loses his head easily, went and cooked up for them at three o'clock in the afternoon every last beefsteak we were going to have for dinner that night. We didn't have a thing but beans left! But we didn't grumble very much, either. They were the coldest, hungriest-looking lot you ever saw. It did your heart good to see the way they got around those beefsteaks!"

I gaze at him baffled. "But, Groissard, you kill them. You are there to kill them! What can you care whether they have beefsteaks or not."

He stops playing with the baby to look at me, round-eyed with astonishment. "I'm not there to kill prisoners!" he says, with an unanswerable simplicity. And I lose myself again in a maze of conjecture and speculation.

III

"Oh, it's got to stop, that's all; it's too sickening, too imbecile, too monstrous!"

It is the brancardier talking, the one who had been a prosperous sugar-broker before the war, and who has been a first-line stretcher-carrier since the beginning of the war. If you think you have any idea what it has meant to be first-line stretcher-carrier for three years, you have only to hear Paul Arbagnan talk for five minutes to guess at the extent of your ignorance. He is just back from the front, on a twenty-four hours' furlough, granted after a terrible fortnight under incessant fire. He sits in the midst of our family group, beside his older brother, the despatch-carrier, also here "en permission." The brother was before the war a professor of political economy. From the worn blue uniforms of both brothers swings the croix de guerre gloriously. The younger one's face is thin and very brown, his blue eyes look out at us with an irritable flicker. The mud dried on his clumsy boots crumbles off in great flakes on my polished floor. His hard, grimy hand with broken nails (which had been so fine and well-kept before the war) teases and pulls at his close-clipped hair, now as grizzled with silver as that of a man twenty years his senior.

A harmless elderly relative murmurs something sentimental about the mud on the floor being sacred earth, like that the Crusaders brought back from Jerusalem, and the inevitable explosion takes place. "Oh, you people at the rear, your silly chatter about heroism and holy causes! You don't know what you are talking about. There ought to be a law to make all the civilian population keep silence about the war. You have no idea, not the faintest glimmering of a notion of what life is at the front! If you had...! My croix de guerre! Don't you suppose I would give it back ten times over if I could forget what I feel deliberately to leave a mortally wounded man to die because I have orders to select (if my stretcher has not room enough for all) only those who may get well enough to go back and fight again. Without having known what it is, you've no right to say a word, to have an opinion or a thought about it, you safe, clean, soft, gossiping people at the rear! The dirt ...! Why, the bath I had this morning here in Paris was the first time I have taken my clothes off, except to hunt for vermin, for twenty-two days. Do you know what your body is like, what your clothes are like, what your socks are like, when you have lived and cooked and sweat and slept and bled in them for twenty-two days? Of course you don't. No civilized being does. And until you do, less talk from you about the heroism of the soldier! Filth, that's what war is, and dirty diseases lying in wait for decent men. And cold, cold day and night, cold that brutalizes, that degenerates you till you would sell your soul, your mother's soul to be warm again. And mud, not clean country mud, but filth, and up to your eyes and beyond, horrible infected mud splashing upon the emergency bandage you are trying to put on a wound. And the wounded ... see here, when the newspapers speak complacently of the superb artillery preparation which after three days of cannon-duel silences the enemy's batteries, do you know what that means to me? It means I am squatting all day in an underground shelter, with twenty wounded, the German shells falling one a minute over my head, my supplies of bandages gone, my anÆsthetics gone, no cotton, not even a cup of water left. To see them die there, begging for help, calling for their mothers ... to crouch there helpless, all day long, hearing the shells falling, and wondering which one will come through the roof—oh, you have plenty of time to think the whole proposition over, the business you're in. You have time, let me tell you, to have your own opinion of the imbecility of setting one highly civilized man down in filth and degradation to shoot at others. When some idiot of a journalist, reporting the war, speaks of the warlike ardor of the men, how it is difficult to restrain them until the order to charge is given ... when we read such paragraphs in the papers ... if you could hear the snarl that goes up! We 'charge' when the word of command is given, yes, because we know nothing better to do, but ..."

The sentimental aunt breaks in resolutely: "Of course, it's very noble of you, Paul; the fact is simply that you don't or won't recognize your own courage."

"Courage, nonsense! A rat in a hole, surrounded by other rats putrefying ... that's what I am in my underground shelter! What else can I do? What else can we any of us do? We can't get away! There wouldn't be anywhere to go if we did! But when I think of the people at the rear, how they don't know, will never know, the sickening hours the troops live through. See here! No sensitive, civilized being can forget it if he has only once been wholly filthy, wholly bestial ... and we have been that, time without number. When I come back to Paris on furlough and look at the crowds in the Paris streets, the old men with white collars, and clean skins, the women with curled hair and silk stockings, I could kill them, when I think that they will have a voice in the future, will affect what will be done hereafter about war ..."

"Time for your train, Paul," warns the elder brother soberly.

The man who had been reviling the life of a soldier springs instantly to his feet and looks anxiously at his watch. He claps on his blue steel casque.

We try to give a light touch to the last of his stay. "How medieval those helmets make you look!"

He is not to be distracted. "Put it further back, stone-age, cannibalistic," he cries bitterly, marching out hurriedly so that he may be promptly at his task.

The elder brother comes back from the door, a dim, patient smile on his lips. "Oh, Paul, poor boy! He takes it hard! He takes it hard!" he murmurs. "Who would think to hear him that he is accounted the best brancardier in his section? He is the one always sent out to do the impossible, and he always goes, silently, and does it. After this last engagement, he had shown such bravoure, they wanted to have him cited again, to give him the palms to wear above his croix. But he said he had had his share, that others had done as much as he, and he persuaded them to give the croix to one of the other brancardiers, a stevedore from Marseilles who can't read or write. You are perhaps not surprised to know that he is adored by his comrades."

"But is it true ... all he says?" I ask, shivering a little.

"Oh yes, true enough, and more than he says or any one can ever say. But, but ..." He searches for a metaphor and finds it with a smile. "See, Paul is like a man with a fearful toothache! He can't think of anything else. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything else."

I ask him: "But you, who have been through all that Paul sees, what do you find, besides?" He hesitates, smiling no longer, and finally brings out in a low tone: "When a mother gives birth to a child, she suffers, suffers horribly. Perhaps all the world is now trying to give birth to a new idea, which we have talked of, but never felt before; the idea that all of us, each of us, is responsible for what happens to all, to each, that we must stick together for good...." He picks up his steel helmet, and looks at us with his dim, patient, indomitable smile. "It is like a little new baby in more ways than one, that new idea. It has cost us such agony; and it is so small, so weak, so needing all our protection ... and then also, because ..." his sunken eyes are prophetic, "because it is alive, because it will grow!"

IV

I glance at my calendar in dismay. Is it possible that three months have gone, and that it is time for Amieux to have another "permission"? How long the week of his furlough always seems, how the three months between race away! Of course we have the greatest regard for Amieux. We feel that his uniform alone (he is a chasseur alpin who has been a first-line fighter since the Battle of the Marne) would entitle him to our services, but more than that, his personality commands our respect, sound, steady, quiet Amieux whose sturdy body is wounded in one place after another, who is repaired hastily in the nearest hospital and uncomplainingly goes back to the trenches, his sleeve decorated with another one of the V-shaped marks which denote wounds. The only trouble with Amieux as a household hero is a total dearth of subjects of conversation. You see, he is a glass-blower by profession. We often feel that if we were not as ignorant of glass-blowing as Amieux is of everything else, we could get on famously with him. As it is ...

"Oh bon jour, M. Amieux," I say, jumping to my feet, "welcome back to the rear! All well?"

"Yes, madame," he says with as ponderous an emphasis on the full-stop as that of any taciturn New England farmer.

"Well, has it been hard, the last three months?" I ask.

"No, madame."

I draw a long breath.

"Do the packages we send, the chocolate, the cigarettes, the soap—do they reach you promptly?"

"Yes, madame. Thank you, madame."

The full-stop is more overpowering with each answer.

I resort to more chatter, anything to fill that resounding silence. "Here we have been so busy! So many more American volunteers are coming over for the Ambulance service, my husband has not a free moment. The children never see him. My little daughter is doing well in school. She begins to read French now. Of course the little son doesn't go to school, but he is learning to speak French like a French baby. It has been so cold here. There has been so little coal. You must have heard, the long lines waiting to get coal ..." I stop with almost a shrug of exasperation. As well talk to a basalt statue as to Amieux, impassive, his rough red hands on his knees, his musette swollen with all the miscellaneous junk the poilu stuffs into that nondescript receptacle, his cap still firmly on his head ... formal manners are not specialties of Amieux. And then I notice that one leg is thrust out, very stiff and straight, and has a big bulbous swelling which speaks of a bandage under the puttees.

I glance at it. "Rheumatism? Too much water in the trenches?"

He looks down at it without a flicker on his face. "No, madame, a wound."

"Really? How did it happen this time?"

He looks faintly bored. They always hate to tell how they were wounded. "Oh, no particular way. A shell had smashed up an abri, and while I was trying to pull my captain out from under the timbers another shell exploded near by."

"Did you save the captain?"

"Oh yes. He was banged up around the head. He's all right now."

"Were you there with him? How did it happen you weren't buried under the wreck too?"

"I wasn't there. I was in a trench. But I saw. I knew he was there."

I am so used to Amieux's conversational style that I manage even through this arid narration to see what had happened. "Do you mean to say that you left the trench and went out under shell-fire to rescue your captain! And they didn't give you a decoration! It's outrageous not recognizing such bravery!"

He shuffles his feet and looks foolish. "The captain wanted to have me cited all right. He's a chic type, but I said he'd better not."

"Don't you want the croix de guerre?" I cry, astounded at such apathy even from Amieux.

"Oh, I wouldn't mind. It's my mother."

"Don't you suppose your mother would love to have her son decorated?" I feel there must be some absurd misunderstanding between us, the man seems to be talking such nonsense.

"Well, you see, my mother ... my only brother was killed last winter. Maman worries a good deal about me, and I told her, just so she could sleep quietly, you know, I have told her my company isn't near the front at all. I said we were guarding a munitions depot at the rear."

"Well ..." I am still at a loss.

"Well, don't you see, if I get the croix de guerre for being under fire, maman would get to worrying again. So I told my captain I'd rather he'd give it to one of the other fellows."

V

I had just come from several hours spent with one of the war-blind, one of those among the educated, unresigned war-blind, who see too clearly with the eyes of their intelligence what has happened to them. I had been with him, looking into his sightless face, pitting my strength against the bitterness of his voice; and I was tired, tired to the marrow of my bones, to the tip of every nerve.

But the children had not been out for their walk and the day was that rare thing in a Paris March, a sunshiny one, not to be wasted. "Come, dears," I told them as I entered the apartment, "get on your wraps. We'll all go out for a play while the sun is still high."

I walked along the street between them, my little daughter and my little son, their warm soft hands in mine. The sparrows chattered in the bare trees above us, the sparrows who even in this keen air felt the coming of spring which was foretold by the greening of the grass in the public squares. My children chattered incessantly, like the sparrows. Perhaps they felt the spring too. I did not want to feel the spring. We turned away from the Seine and walked on one side of the open square before Notre Dame.

"Mother, I caught my ball twenty-three times to-day without missing."

"Muvver, I see a white horse, a big white horsie!"

"Mother, do you like arithmetic as well as history? I don't."

"Muvver, I have a little p'tend doggie here, trotting after me, a little brown p'tend doggie."

"Mother, O mother, let me tell you what happened at school to-day, during recess!"

Through the half-heard ripple of clear little voices, there came upon me one of those thunder-claps of realization which, since the beginning of the war, have brought wiser and stronger people than I to the brink of insanity—realization for an instant (longer than an instant would carry any one over the brink) that the war is really going on, realization of what the war really means, one glimpse of the black abyss. I felt very sick, and stood still for an instant, because my knees shook under me....

But those wiser and stronger ones had not little children of their own to draw them away from that black gulf.... I was pulled at by impatient little hands, lucid, ineffably pure eyes were turned up to mine, the clear little voices grew louder, "Muvver, muvver, I'm losing my mitten!"

"Mother, why are you standing still? This isn't a good place to play! There! A little nearer the big church is some sand. And a bench for you."

How could I go on this everyday commonplace life, eating, drinking, sleeping, caring for the children, cheering them ... in such a wicked and imbecile world! I looked up and down the bare, sun-flooded square. All about me were other women, caring for little children. And for the most part, those other women were in mourning. But they were there under that cruel, careless sunshine, caring for their children, cheering them....

I put the little mitten on; I walked forward to the bench, the little singing voices died away to a ripple again. "Oh, this is fine! See, little brother, here is a cave already. Let me have that stick!" "No, me! Me!"

That was what was sounding in my ears. But what I heard was a muffled voice saying scornfully: "Re-education ... courage, taking up our lives again ... oh yes, whatever you please to imagine to distract our attention! But we are finished men, done for ... lost!"

My children played before me in the sunshine, but what I saw were the scarred, mutilated, sightless faces of young men in their prime, with long lives of darkness before them. And as I sat there, then, that instant, other young men in their prime were being blinded, were being mutilated for life.

My fatigue deepened till it was like lead upon me. Under it I was cold. The sun did not warm me. It fell like a mockery upon a race gone mad, upon a world bankrupt in hope. Yes, what we suffered was not the worst, not even what they suffered, the men at the front; what was worst was the fact that the meaning of it all was hopelessness, was the end, a black end to all we had looked forward to, striven for ... paralysis, death in life. And an indifferent sun shining down on it, as it had on our illusions.

After a time the children tired of sand. "Mother, mayn't we go in the big church? You never have taken us inside. What does it look like?"

Their restless upspringing life thrust my paralysis aside as an upspringing young tree cleaves the boulder which would hamper it. We pushed open the heavy leather door and stepped into the huge cavern, our eyes so full of the glare of the sunshine that, as we walked forward up the nave, we could see nothing but velvety darkness, faintly scented with mold and incense.

The silence was so intense that I could hear my sore, angry heart beating furiously in my breast....

Further along before us, where rich-colored patches lay, on the stone pavement, there was the light from the great rose-windows.... We stood there now, our eyes slowly clearing, the blackness slowly fading out into twilight, to a sweet, clear translucent dimness which hid nothing.

Silence, long, shadowy veiled aisles, hushed immensity ...

A great calm hand seemed laid on my shoulder, so that my fever sank, my pulses were quieted. I stood motionless, feeling slowly pulsating through me a vaster rhythm than the throbbing irregularity of my own doubting heart. A great soundless benediction was breathed upon me out of the man-wrought beauty around and above me.

Up, up, up, I raised my eyes, following the soaring of the many-columned pillars, and something in my heart burst its leaden bonds and soared up out of my breast....

Yes, here was beauty, here was that beauty I had forgotten and denied ... and men had made it! It had nothing to do with the glare of the indifferent sun, with the callous face of our calamity. Men had made this beauty, imperfect, warring, doubting, suffering, sinning men had upreared this perfect creation. They had created this beauty out of their faith in righteousness, and they would again create other beauty, out of other manifestations of righteousness, long after this war was a forgotten nightmare....

"What is that shining on your face, mother?"

I put my hand up. My cheeks are wet. "Tears, dear."

"O mother, why do you cry?"

"Because I am very happy, my darling."