This is true to only a limited extent in the upper circles of the bourgeoisie.  Some of the women of the wealthier class dress magnificently, have their lovers and their scandals (in what class do they not?), and before the war danced the night away.  But the great majority rarely wandered far from their domestic kingdom, quite content with an occasional ball, dinner, or play.  A daughter’s marriage was the greatest event in their lives, and the endless preparations throughout the long engagement, a subdued but delicious period of excitement.  Their social circles, whatever their birth, were extremely restricted, and they were, above all things, the mates of their husbands.

IV

But the war has changed all that.  France has had something like a war a generation from time immemorial, but in modern times, since woman has found herself, they have been brief.  Feminism, whether approved by the great mass of Frenchwomen or not, has done its insidious work.  And for many years now there has been the omnipresent American woman with her careless independence; and, still more recently, the desperate fight of the English women for liberty.

It was quite natural when this war swept across Europe like a fiery water-spout, for the French woman of even the bourgeoisie to come forth from her shell (although at first not to the same degree as the noblesse) and work with other women for the men at the Front and the starving at home.  Not only did the racing events of those first weeks compel immediate action, but the new ideas they had imbibed, however unwillingly, dictated their course as inevitably as that of the more experienced women across the channel.  The result was that these women for the first time in their narrow intensive lives found themselves meeting, daily, women with whom they had had the most distant if any acquaintance; sewing, knitting, talking more and more intimately over their work, running all sorts of oeuvres, founding homes for refugees, making up packages for prisoners in Germany (this oeuvre was conceived and developed into an immense organization by Madame Wallestein), serving on six or eight committees, becoming more and more interdependent as they worked for a common and unselfish cause; their circle of acquaintances and friends as well as their powers of usefulness, their independent characteristics which go so far toward the making of personality, rising higher and higher under the impetus of deprisoned tides until they flowed gently over the dam of the centuries; the flood, be it noted, taking possession of wide pastures heretofore sacred to man.

Naturally these women spent very little time at home; although, such is the incomparable training of those practical methodical minds, even with a diminished staff of servants the domestic machinery ran as smoothly as when they devoted to it so many superfluous hours.

And with these new acquaintances, all practically of their own class, they talked in time not only of the war and their ever augmenting duties, but, barriers lowered by their active sympathies, found themselves taking a deep interest in other lives, and in the things that had interested other women of more intelligence or of more diversified interests than their own.