It may be well to digress a moment in this narrative, from our purely martial adventure, that we may consider for a few pages the woman question as it is affected by the war.  To me, if not to Henry, who is highly practical, it seemed that in France and Italy, but particularly in England, the new Heaven and the new earth that is forming during this war, has created a new woman.  Indeed the European woman of the war is almost American in her liberty.

“European women,” said a former American grand dame of the old order, sipping tea with me at an embassy in the dim lit gorgeousness of a mediaeval room, “are of two kinds:  Those who are being crucified by the war, and those who are abusing the new found liberties which war has brought them!”

“Liberties?” asked her colloquitor; not Henry.  He had no patience with these theoretical excursions into speculative realms.  “Liberties rather than privileges?”

“Yes, liberties.  Privileges are temporary,” purred the lady at the embassy.  “They come and go, but the whole trouble with this new situation is that it is permanent.  That also is part of the crucifixion of those who suffer under it.  These women never again can return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positions from which the awful needs of this war have driven them.  The cultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highest product of our civilization, has gone.  She has fallen to the American level.”

“And the continental mistress system,” prodded her American interviewer, ironically, “will it, too, disappear with the departed superiority of continental womanhood?”

“Yes, the mistress system too—­if you want to call it a system—­and I suppose it is an institution—­it too will become degraded and Americanized.”

“Americanized?” the middle western eyebrows went up, and possibly the middle western voice flinched a little.  But the wise dowager from Bridgeport, Connecticut, living in Paris on New York Central bonds, continued bitterly:  “Yes, Americanized and vulgarized.  The continental mistress system is not the nasty arrangement that you middle class Americans think it is.  Of course there are European men who acquire one woman after another, live with her a few months or a few years and forget her.  Such men are impossible.”

She waved away the whole lady-chasing tribe with a contemptuous hand.

“But the mistress system as we know it in Europe is the by-product of a leisure class.  Men and women marry for business reasons.  The women have their children to love, the man finds his mistress, and clings to her for a lifetime.  He cannot afford to marry her—­even if he could be divorced; for he would have to work to support her, and be declassed.  But he can support her on his wife’s money and a beautiful life-long friendship is thus cherished.  It will disappear when men have to work, and when women may go into the world to work without losing