fell down into the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and the cabins below were sealed—­and thus become insupportable—­they settled themselves for the night in their steamer-chairs and smiled at the remark of M. le Commissaire that it was a good “season” for submarines.  The moonlight filtered through the chinks in the burlap shrouding the deck.  About 3 a.m. the khaki-clad lawyer from Milwaukee became communicative, the Red Cross ladies produced chocolate.  It was the genial hour before the final nap, from which one awoke abruptly at the sound of squeegees and brooms to find the deck a river of sea water, on whose banks a wild scramble for slippers and biscuit-boxes invariably ensued.  No experience could have been more socializing.

“Well, it’s a relief,” one of the ladies exclaimed, “not to be travelling with half a dozen trunks and a hat-box!  Oh, yes, I realize what I’m doing.  I’m going to live in one of those flimsy portable houses with twenty cots and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, but it’s better than thrashing around looking for something to do and never finding it, never getting anything real to spend one’s energy-on.  I’ve closed my country house, I’ve sublet my apartment, I’ve done with teas and bridge, and I’m happier than I’ve been in my life even if I don’t get enough sleep.”

Another lady, who looked still young, had two sons in the army.  “There was nothing for me to do but sit around the house and wait, and I want to be useful.  My husband has to stay at home; he can’t leave his business.”  Be useful!  There she struck the new and aggressive note of emancipation from the restricted self-sacrifice of the old order, of wider service for the unnamed and the unknown; and, above all, for the wider self-realization of which service is but a by-product.  I recall particularly among these women a young widow with an eager look in clear grey eyes that gazed eastward into the unknown with hope renewed.  Had she lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been doomed to slow desiccation.  There are thousands of such women in France today, and to them the great war has brought salvation.

From what country other than America could so many thousands of pilgrims —­even before our nation had entered the war—­have hurried across a wide ocean to take their part?  No matter what religion we profess, whether it be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are individualists, pragmatists, empiricists for ever.  Our faces are set toward strange worlds presently to rise out of the sea and take on form and colour and substance—­worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values.  And on this voyage I was reminded of Josiah Royce’s splendid summary of the American philosophy—­of the American religion as set forth by William James: