Then the French Colonel hove in sight and she said:  “Oh, yes—­come on, Col-o-nel”—­making three unaccented syllables of the word—­“and we shall have une femme sandweech.”  She gave the Colonel her arm.  The miserable Kansan had not thought to take it, being busy with the Beacon Building or the water hazard at the Emporia Country Club, and then, as the Col-o-nel took her arm she lifted the Eyes to the stupid clod of a Kansan and switched on all the joyous incandescence of her lamps as she said, addressing the Frenchman but gazing sweetly at the American, “Col-o-nel, will you please carry my books?” They must have weighed six or eight ounces!  And she shifted them to the Col-o-nel as though they weighed a ton!

So the Kansan walked wearily to the smoking room to find his mate.  They two then and there discussed the woman proposition in detail and drew up strong resolutions of respect for the Wichita and Emporia type, the American type that carries its own books and burdens and does not require of its men a silly and superficial chivalry and does not stimulate it by the everlasting lure of sex!  Men may die for the Princess and her kind and enjoy death.  We were willing that they should.  We evinced no desire to impose our kultur on others.  But after that day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for Henry and me!  So we went to the front stoop of the boat and watched the Armenians drill.  A great company of them was crowded in the steerage and all day long, with a sergeant major, they went through the drill.  They were returning to Europe to fight with the French army and avenge the wrongs of their people.  When they tired of drilling, they danced, and when they tired of dancing, they sang.  It was queer music for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang.  It was written on a barbaric scale with savage cadences and broken time; but it was none the less sweet for being weird.  It had the charm and freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as the strange brown faces that lifted toward us as they sang.

“What is that music?” asked the Kansans of a New England boy in khaki who had been playing Greig that day for them on the piano.  “That,” nodded the youth toward the Armenians.  “Oh, that—­why that’s the ‘Old Oaken Bucket!’” His face did not relax and he went away whistling!  So there we were.  The Col-o-nel and the lady with their idea on the woman question, the Armenians with their bizarre music, the Yankee with his freaky humour, and the sedentary gold dust twins from Kansas, and a great boat-load of others like them in their striking differences of ideals and notions, all hurrying across the world to help in the great fight for democracy which, in its essence, is only the right to live in the world, each man, each cult, each race, each blood and each nation after its own kind.  And about all the war involves is the right to live, and to love one’s own kind of women, one’s own kind of music, one’s own kind of humour, one’s own kind of philosophy;