I never thought Valentine Thompson more remarkable than during this hour dedicated to the tuning and exalting of the souls of these girls.  Several told me that she held their hearts in her hands when she talked and that they would follow her straight to the battlefield.  She, herself, assumed her most serious and exalted expression.  I have never heard any one use more exquisite French.  Not for a moment did she talk down to those girls of a humbler sphere.  She lifted them to her own.  Her voice took on deeper tones, but she always stopped short of being dramatic.  French people of all classes are too keen and clear-sighted and intelligent to be taken in by theatrical tricks, and Mlle. Thompson made no mistakes.  Her only mistake was in neglecting these girls later on for other new enterprises that claimed her ardent imagination.

She talked, I remember, of patriotism, of morale, of their duty to excel in their present studies that they might be of service not only to their impoverished families but to their beloved France.  It was not so much what she said as the lovely way in which she said it, her impressive manner and appearance, her almost overwhelming but, for the occasion, wholly democratic personality.

Once a week Mlle. Thompson and the heads of the Touring Club de France had a breakfast at the Ecole and tables were laid even in the salon.  I was always somebody’s guest upon these Tuesdays, unless I was engaged elsewhere, and had, moreover, been for years a member of the Touring Club.  Some of the most distinguished men and women of Paris came to the breakfasts:  statesmen, journalists, authors, artists, people of le beau monde, visiting English and Americans as well as French people of note.  Naturally the students became expert waitresses and chasseurs as well as cooks.

Altogether I should have only the pleasantest memories of the Ecole Feminine had it not been for the mosquitoes.  I do not believe that New Jersey ever had a worse record than Paris that summer.  Every leaf of every one of those beautiful trees beyond my window, over whose tops I used to gaze at the airplanes darting about on the lookout for taubes, was an incubator.  I exhausted the resources of two chemist shops in Passy and one in Paris.  I tried every invention, went to bed reeking with turpentine, and burned evil-smelling pastiles.  Mlle. Jacquier came in every night and slew a dozen with a towel as scientifically as she did everything else.  All of no avail.  At one time I was so spotted that I had to wear a still more heavily spotted veil.  I looked as if afflicted with measles.

Oddly enough the prettiest of the students, whose first name was Alice, was the only one of us all ignored by the mosquitoes.  She had red-gold hair and a pink and white skin of great delicacy, and she might have been the twin of Elsie Ferguson.  A few of the other girls were passably good-looking but she was the only one with anything like beauty—­which, it would seem, is practically confined to the noblesse and grande bourgeoisie in France.  Next to her in looks came Mlle. Jacquier, who if she had a dot would have been snapped up long since.