Last summer she went to a small town, to which is attached a very large military camp, to help her sister-in-law in the running of a cafe.  The excursion was to be partly in the nature of a holiday; but, indefatigable on a chair with a needle, she could not stand for hours on her feet, ministering to a sex of which she knew almost nothing.  She had the nostalgia of the Parisian garret.  She must go home to her neglected habits.  The war was waging.  She delayed, from a sense of duty.  But at last her habits were irresistible.  Officers had said lightly that there was no danger, that the Germans could not possibly reach that small town.  Nevertheless, the train that the spinster-sempstress took was the last train to leave.  And as the spinster-sempstress departed by the train, so the sister-in-law departed in a pony-cart, with a son and a grandmother in the pony-cart, together with such goods as the cart would hold; and, through staggering adventures, reached safety at Troyes.

“And how did you yourself get on?” I asked the spinster-sempstress.

She answered: 

“It was terrible.  Ordinarily it is a journey of three or four hours.  But that time it lasted three days and two nights.  The train was crammed with refugees and with wounded.  One was obliged to stand up.  One could not move.”

“But where did you sleep?”

“I did not sleep.  Do I not tell you one was obliged to stand up?  I stood up all the first night.  The floor was thirty centimetres deep in filth.  The second night one had settled down somewhat.  I could sit.”

“But about eating?”

“I had a little food that I brought with me.”

“And drinking?”

“Nothing, till the second day.  One could not move.  But in the end we arrived.  I was broken with fatigue.  I was very ill.  But I was home.  The Boches drank everything in the cafe, everything; but the building was spared—­it stood away from the firing.  How long do you think the war will last?”

“I’m beginning to think it will last a long time.”

“So they say,” she murmured, glancing through the window at the prospect of roofs and chimney-cowls.  “Provided that it finishes well...”

Except by the look in her eyes, and by the destruction of her once good complexion, it was impossible to divine that this woman’s habits had ever been disturbed in the slightest detail.  But the gaze and the complexion told the tale.

Next:  the Boulevard St. Germain.  A majestic flat, heavily and sombrely furnished.  The great drawing-room is shut and sheeted with holland.  It has been shut for twenty years.  The mistress of this home is an aged widow of inflexible will and astounding activity.  She gets up at five a.m., and no cook has ever yet satisfied her.  The master is her son, a bachelor of fifty.  He is paralysed, and always perfectly dressed in the English taste, he passes his life in a wheeled chair.  The home