The streets of Paris have now a perpetual aspect of Sunday morning; only the sound of church-bells is lacking.  A few of the taxi-cabs have come back; but all the auto-buses without exception are away behind the front.  So that the traffic is forced underground, where the railways are manned by women.  A horse-bus, dug up out of the past, jogs along the most famous boulevard in the world like a country diligence, with a fat, laughing peasant-woman clinging to its back-step and collecting fare-moneys into the immense pocket of her black apron.  Many of the most expensive and unnecessary shops are shut; the others wait with strange meekness for custom.  But the provision shops and all the sturdy cheap shops of the poor go on naturally, without any self-consciousness, just as usual.  The pavements show chiefly soldiers in a wild, new variety of uniforms, from pale blue to black, imitated and adapted from all sources, and especially from England—­and widows and orphans.  The number of young girls and women in mourning, in the heavy mourning affected by the Latin race, is enormous.  This crape is the sole casualty list permitted by the French War Office.  It suffices.  Supreme grief is omnipresent; but it is calm, cheerful, smiling.  Widows glance at each other with understanding, like initiates of a secret and powerful society.

Never was Paris so disconcertingly odd.  And yet never was it more profoundly itself.  Between the slow realisation of a monstrous peril escaped and the equally slow realisation of its power to punish, the French spirit, angered and cold, knows at last what the French spirit is.  And to watch and share its mood is positively ennobling to the stranger.  Paris is revealed under an enchantment, On the surface of the enchantment the pettinesses of daily existence persist queerly.

Two small rooms and a kitchen on a sixth floor.  You could put the kitchen, of which the cooking apparatus consists of two gas-rings, in the roots of the orange-tree in the Tuileries gardens.  Everything is plain, and stringently tidy; everything is a special item, separately acquired, treasured.  I see again a water-colour that I did years ago and had forgotten; it lives, protected by a glazed frame and by the pride of possession.  The solitary mistress of this immaculate home is a spinster sempstress in the thirties.  She earns three francs a day, and is rich because she does not spend it all, and has never spent it all.  Inexpressibly neat, smiling, philosophic, helpful, she has within her a contentious and formidable tiger which two contingencies, and two only, will arouse.  The first contingency springs from any threat of marriage.  You must not seek a husband for her; she is alone in the world, and she wants to be.  The second springs from any attempt to alter her habits, which in her sight are as sacredly immutable as the ritual of an Asiatic pagoda.