She is certainly one of its towering personalities and if she does not stand out at the end of the war as Woman and Her Achievements personified it will be because she has the defects of her genius.  Her restless ambition and her driving energy hurl her headlong into one great relief work after another, until she has undertaken more than any mere mortal can carry through in any given space of time.  She is therefore in danger of standing for no one monumental work (as will be the happy destiny of Mlle. Javal, for instance), although no woman’s activities or sacrifices will have been greater.

It may be imagined that such a woman when she started a newspaper would be in a position to induce half the prominent men and women in France either to write for it or to give interviews, and this she did, of course; she has a magnificent publicity sense.  The early numbers of La Vie Feminine were almost choked with names known to “tout Paris.”  It flourished in both branches, and splendid offices were opened on the Avenue des Champs Elysees.  Women came for advice and employment and found both, for Mlle. Thompson is as sincere in her desire to help the less fortunate of her sex as she is in her feminism.

II

Then came the War.

Mlle. Thompson’s plans were formed in a day, her Committees almost as quickly. La Vie Feminine opened no less than seven ouvroirs, where five hundred women were given work.  When the refugees began pouring in she was among the first to ladle out soup and deplete her wardrobe.  She even went to the hastily formed hospitals in Paris and offered her services.  As she was not a nurse she was obliged to do the most menial work, which not infrequently consisted in washing the filthy poilus wounded after weeks of fighting without a bath or change of clothing.  Sometimes the dirt-caked soldiers were natives of Algiers.  But she performed her task with her accustomed energy and thoroughness, and no doubt the mere sight of her was a God-send to those men who had for so long looked upon nothing but blood and death and horrors.

Then came the sound of the German guns thirty kilometers from Paris.  The Government decided to go to Bordeaux.  Mlle. Thompson’s father insisted that his daughter accompany himself and her mother.  At first she refused.  What should she do with the five hundred women in her ouvroirs, the refugees she fed daily?  She appealed to Ambassador Herrick.  But our distinguished representative shook his head.  He had trouble enough on his hands.  The more beautiful young women who removed themselves from Paris before the Boche entered it the simpler would be the task of the men forced to remain.  It was serious enough that her even more beautiful sister had elected to remain with her husband, whose duties forbade him to flee.  Go, Mademoiselle, and go quickly.