We whizzed through the dusk in the suburbs of Paris that night, seeing the gathering implements of war coming into the landscape for the first time—­the army trucks, the horizon blue of the French uniform, the great training camps, the Red Cross store houses, the scores and scores of hospitals that might be seen in the public buildings with Red Cross flags on them, the munition plants pouring out their streams of women workers in their jumpers and overalls.

The girl porters came through and turned on the lights in the train.  No lights outside told us that we were hurrying through a great city.  Paris was dark.  We went through the underground where there was more light than there was above ground.  The streets seemed like tunnels and the tunnels like streets.  We came into the dingy station and a score of women porters and red capped girls came for our baggage.  They ran the trucks, they moved the express; they took care of the mail, and through them we edged up the stairway into the half-lighted station and looked out into the night—­black, lampless, engulfing—­and it was Paris!

It was nine o’clock as we stood on the threshold of the station peering into the murk.  Not a taxi was in the stand waiting; but from afar we could hear a great honking of auto-horns, that sounded like the night calls of monster birds flitting over the city.  The air was vibrant with these wild calls.  We were an hour waiting there in the gloom for a conveyance.  But when we left the wide square about the station, and came into the streets of Paris, we understood why the auto horns were bellowing so.  For the automobiles were running lickety-split through the darkness without lights and the howls of their horns pierced the night.  The few street lights burning a low candle power at the intersections of the great boulevards were hooded and cast but a pale glow on the pavements.  And as we rode from our station and passed the Tuileries and the Rue de Rivoli, save for the dim outline of the iron railings of the Gardens ten feet from our cab window, we had no sign to mark our way.  Yet our cab whizzed along at a twenty-five mile gait, and every few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out of the darkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes we would be abreast of another and the fiendish horns of us would go screaming in chorus as we raced and passed and repassed one another on the broad street.  The din was nerve racking—­but highly Parisian.  One fancied that Paris, being denied its lights, made up its quota of sensation by multiplying its sound!

We went to the Ritz—­now smile; the others did!  Not that the Ritz is an inferior hotel.  We went there because it was really the grandee among Paris hotels.  Yet every day we were in Paris when we told people we were at the Ritz, they smiled.  The human mind doesn’t seem to be able to associate Henry and me with the Ritz without the sense of the eternal fitness of things going wapper-jawed and catawampus.