Again the question troubled her.  She had not seen her father since that week-end, nearly six months ago, when she had ran down to see him because she wanted something from him.  “He felt my mother’s death very deeply,” she answered.  “But he’s well enough in health.”

“Remember me to him,” he said.  “And tell him I thank him for all those years of love and gentleness.  I don’t think he will be offended.”

He drove her back to Paris, and she promised to come and see him in his studio and let him introduce her to his artist friends.

“I shall try to win you over, I warn you,” he said.  “Politics will never reform the world.  They appeal only to men’s passions and hatreds.  They divide us.  It is Art that is going to civilize mankind; broaden his sympathies.  Art speaks to him the common language of his loves, his dreams, reveals to him the universal kinship.”

Mrs. Denton’s friends called upon her, and most of them invited her to their houses.  A few were politicians, senators or ministers.  Others were bankers, heads of business houses, literary men and women.  There were also a few quiet folk with names that were historical.  They all thought that war between France and England would be a world disaster, but were not very hopeful of averting it.  She learnt that Carleton was in Berlin trying to secure possession of a well-known German daily that happened at the moment to be in low water.  He was working for an alliance between Germany and England.  In France, the Royalists had come to an understanding with the Clericals, and both were evidently making ready to throw in their lot with the war-mongers, hoping that out of the troubled waters the fish would come their way.  Of course everything depended on the people.  If the people only knew it!  But they didn’t.  They stood about in puzzled flocks, like sheep, wondering which way the newspaper dog was going to hound them.  They took her to the great music halls.  Every allusion to war was greeted with rapturous applause.  The Marseillaise was demanded and encored till the orchestra rebelled from sheer exhaustion.  Joan’s patience was sorely tested.  She had to listen with impassive face to coarse jests and brutal gibes directed against England and everything English; to sit unmoved while the vast audience rocked with laughter at senseless caricatures of supposed English soldiers whose knees always gave way at the sight of a French uniform.  Even in the eyes of her courteous hosts, Joan’s quick glance would occasionally detect a curious glint.  The fools!  Had they never heard of Waterloo and Trafalgar?  Even if their memories might be excused for forgetting Crecy and Poictiers and the campaigns of Marlborough.  One evening—­it had been a particularly trying one for Joan—­there stepped upon the stage a wooden-looking man in a kilt with bagpipes under his arm.  How he had got himself into the programme Joan could not understand.