Versailles was as green and peaceful as if a few miles away the shells were not ripping up a field a shot.  After lunch in the famous hotel ordinarily one of the gayest in France at that time of the year, we first visited the rest hospital of Miss Morgan, Miss Marbury and Miss de Wolfe, and then drove out into the country to Madame Berard’s historical estate.  Here, in the courtyard of a good-sized building, we were greeted by about forty children in pink-and-white gingham aprons, and heads either shaved or finished off with tightly braided pigtails.  It seemed to me then that they were all smiling, and—­for they had been there some weeks—­that most of them looked round and healthy.  But I soon found that some were still too languid to play.  One lying in a long chair on the terrace at the back of the house and gazing vacantly out at the beautiful woods was tubercular, the victim of months in a damp cellar.  Another, although so excessively cheerful that I suspect she was not “all there” was also confined to a long chair, with a hip affection of some sort, but she was much petted, and surrounded by all the little luxuries that the victims of her smile had remembered to send her.  One beautiful child had the rickets, and several suffered from intestinal prolapsus and other internal complaints, but were on the road to recovery.

While their Swedish nurse was putting them through their gymnastic exercises I studied their faces.  At first my impression was one of prevailing homeliness; scrubbed, flat, peasant faces, for the most part, without the features or the mental apparatus that provides expression.  But soon I singled out two or three pretty and engaging children, and rarely one whose face was devoid of character.  And they stood well and went through their exercises with precision and vigor.

It was just before we left that my wandering attention was directed toward the scene to which I alluded in my first paragraph.  The greater number of the children were shouting at play in a neighboring field.  The preternaturally happy invalid was smiling at the lovely woods beyond the terrace, woods where little princes had frolicked, and older princes had wooed and won.  Mr. Jaccaci was still petting the beautiful little boy who looked like the bambino on the celebrated fresco of Florence; Mrs. Hill was kissing and hugging several little girls who had clung to her skirts.  It was, in spite of its origin, a happy scene.

I had been waiting by the door for these ceremonies of affection to finish, when I happened to glance at the far end of the wide stone terrace.  There, by the balustrade, in the shadow of the leafy woods, stood a girl of perhaps eight or ten.  Her arms hung at her sides and she was staring straight before her while she cried as I never have seen a child cry; silently, bitterly, with her heavy plain face hardly twisted in its tragic silent woe.