When the Germans were rushing on Paris and invasion seemed as inevitable as the horrors that were bound to follow, Mr. Herrick insisted that Madame Waddington and her sister Miss King, who was almost helpless from rheumatism, follow the Government to the South.  This Madame Waddington reluctantly did, but returned immediately after the Battle of the Marne.

It was not long before the Ouvroir Holophane outgrew its original proportions, and instead of the women coming there daily to sew, they called only for materials to make up at home.  For this ouvroir (if it has managed to exist in these days of decreasing donations) sends to the Front garments of all sorts for soldiers ill or well, pillow-cases, sheets, sleeping-bags, slippers.

Moreover, as soon as the men began to come home on their six days’ leave they found their way to the generous ouvroir on the Boulevard Haussmann, where Madame Waddington, or her friend Mrs. Greene (also an American), or Madame Mygatt, always gave the poor men what they needed to replace their tattered (or missing) undergarments, as well as coffee and bread and butter.

The most difficult women to employ were those who had been accustomed to make embroidery and lace, as well as many who had led pampered lives in a small way and did not know how to sew at all.  But one-franc-fifty stood between them and starvation and they learned.  To-day nearly all of the younger women assisted by those first ouvroirs are more profitably employed.  France has adjusted itself to a state of war and thousands of women are either in Government service and munition factories, or in the reopened shops and restaurants.

III

The Waddingtons being the great people of their district were, of course, looked upon by the peasant farmers and villagers as aristocrats of illimitable wealth.  Therefore when the full force of the war struck these poor people—­they were in the path of the Germans during the advance on Paris, and ruthlessly treated—­they looked to Madame Waddington and her daughter, Madame Francis Waddington, to put them on their feet again.

Francis Waddington, to whom the chateau descended, was in the trenches, but his mother and wife did all they could, as soon as the Germans had been driven back, to relieve the necessities of the dazed and miserable creatures whose farms had been devastated and shops rifled or razed.  Some time, by the way, Madame Waddington may tell the dramatic story of her daughter-in-law’s escape.  She was alone in the chateau with her two little boys when the Mayor of the nearest village dashed up with the warning that the Germans were six kilometers away, and the last train was about to leave.

She had two automobiles, but her chauffeur had been mobilized and there was no petrol.  She was dressed for dinner, but there was no time to change.  She threw on a cloak and thinking of nothing but her children went off with the Mayor in hot haste to catch the train.  From that moment on for five or six days, during which time she never took off her high-heeled slippers with their diamond buckles, until she reached her husband in the North, her experience was one of the side dramas of the war.