mined never to return to Paris. It was the most graceful and impersonal of inquiries. I found my tongue to tell her that I had built a house in Morocco, and that it was my desire to live there. My statements appeared to strike against the polished surfaces of that room, and I had an impression that the hangings and the posed bric-a-brac were advancing upon me. They appeared to possess an actual personality opposed to the truth I wanted to speak. But below these erratic convictions I lived once more in the strength and the passion of my love. I sensed again those great under-structures to which we must ultimately conform, and which I had divined in the first moment of seeing her.

"It may have been that in an attitude or a word I committed myself to her, for there was an instant in which I knew that the first of the barriers she had set up against me was gone. I perceived, as if she had made a confession of surrender, that I had drawn her close to me. I had the illusion of regarding this from a great distance, and as a spectator I watched the flawless strategy of her withdrawal. She had touched new sources of power, and she was fearless.

"But she had made her own terms with eternity, and it was this that she had summoned me to hear.

She

was dexterous and charming, superbly poised. But even her graciousness failed her in the last hours of that pitiless afternoon when she told me the bargain she had driven with life. 'You have been too far away from the world,' she murmured, and her eyes were burning in a face ghostly white with fatigue.

"Permit me to state the facts a little more clearly,' I suggested to her. 'You are to marry this man whose name you have not told me because he is monstrously rich, because he can give you undisputed power. You tell me this because you have determined it to be a question of honor. You tell me before you make the announcement to your world. You want to know that my life is well ordered, so that there will be no mark upon your happiness. He is fabulously rich, you mention. You have set your truths faultlessly before me.'

"It is not that,' she whispered, and

in the silence following close upon her words, a silence in which I heard her soft, untroubled breathing, I saw her hands relax and the white fingers curve in a gesture of abandon as she laced them together and let them rest quietly against the pretty cloth of her gown.

"She was victorious. And I paid her the tribute of remaining there before her and offering her every protestation which would give her pride in her triumph. But I believe that she had not alone defeated me, but herself, and when the stain of color swept back into her cheek, and she declared: 'I do not sell myself. There are more profound things in this marriage,' her shaft failed its mark. I lifted her two hands and kissed them, and she clung to me. She did not want me to leave her.

"But I had the pride to quit the house, and I went directly to my chief. I had matters of work of some importance I wished him to hear. I was still struggling against my profound inability to grasp the meaning of reality. I was succumbing to a desperate nostalgia. I wanted the passion and the purity of my intense isolation, the merciful visions of my exile. I thought of the white, curving roof of the house which had been created by my own hand, so it seemed to me, to stand in brave defiance against the colored spaces of a Moroccan sky.

"But it happened that I did not tell my chief the word I had brought, for with his arm about my shoulder he told me that, on the next day, France was to declare war. It was the war which we had many times considered, the war to which I was bringing him in that moment my small quota of information. We had discussed it, I say. It came within our province. But we had not believed we would fight it. However, with one sentence, and with his arm, as I say, thrown across my shoulder, he gave me back the truth of reality. He was glorious that day; he might have been the veritable spirit of France of which you may have heard mention in the drawing-rooms of nations more protected and less menaced than we were in that moment.

"Be that as it may. I was to return by the first train to Morocco. There

was work that I could do. In the interval I went to see certain men of our Government. It was arranged that I should return to France when my mission either failed or succeeded. So the first day of the third month of winter discovered me on the doorstep of a hut commanding a neat view of intersecting trenches through which supplies were being transferred to the front lines. The file of soldiers stumbling through the communication were struggling forward under the weight of war as if they had been pack-mules in the countries where I had lived; and the formal letter announcing Hélène's engagement rested in the breast-pocket of my new uniform.

"I cannot say that during my years of war I saw my full share of the front. I was despatched too many times upon diplomatic errands to other nations. I do not wish you to believe that I had any desire to get killed out there in the blind welter of humanity. No, I had not achieved that particular pinnacle of gallant cowardice. But I craved the communion with men of my own people, exalted as they were under the common inspiration of fighting a spiritual battle for material gain. I present my facts awkwardly. But the threads binding me to life had been drawn too fine perhaps by the character of my suffering, and I stood in sore need of being hurled, as it were, into the magnitude and fatality of a tremendous human enterprise, where there was neither mystery nor confusion, but only a straightforward response to unquestioned laws. It was not within my power to see this war objectively. I welcomed, as I tell you, the respite of sinking my personal conflict in the routine and monotony of detail. One of my lieutenants had the gift of the fine phrase. We were waiting for the order to press a counter-attack, and he was lying in a bunk of our dug-out, regarding me from under the flame of a candle which was dripping tallow over his blanket and throwing a grotesque shadow over his yellow face and long, humorous nose. 'Not a war,' he pronounced idly; 'a cosmic collision.' He, too, had his deliberate faith in the poetry of events.

"It also occurred that this lieutenant was with me on the night of my difficul

ties. dun. If this was the objective of the enemy, it was equally our own. We did not succeed in our transfer as immediately as we hoped, for when we entered the city, under particular order, a fair number of the houses had already toppled into the canal, and the precious books from the library, as well as the curtain and the costumes from the theater on the opposite side of the way, were flung about the streets, filthy with mud and trampled into a veritable pulp. My lieutenant was for stopping and piecing the fine volumes together. He had his violences, such as they were.

We had contrived to get to Ver

"I was informed afterward that he carried me in his arms through the shell-holes and the chopped wire the night I went down in the second Duaumont attack. A miraculous affair, for he was as helpless and as graceful as a woman. Be that as it may, he led his men forward on that same night, but he was not one destined to cross the threshold of victory. I think of him dying in whatever nameless corner of war he chanced to fall with that delicate, questioning smile printed on his mouth. He was a human being confounded before the passionate, inscrutable gestures of life.

"For my own part, I had fared particularly well. During my first seven months in hospitals it was declared that I would be blind. Word had been sent to Hélène, and the letter she forwarded me I loved; I held it pressed over my bandaged eyes whenever I was permitted to touch it. It may have been that the caress of her hand upon that white note-paper I had never seen gave me the courage to live. At such moments, as you know, it demands no courage to die.

"However, there was a day in Paris when the sight in one of my eyes was returned to me, and an inspired doctor set this glass monstrosity which you. have seen in my right eye-socket. I was struck dumb with shame when I looked at the shining eyeball glaring at me out of my own face. I believed myself a resurrected creature, unfit to breathe and to move among my own kind. And my visions had forsaken me. I could not summon one image of beauty to sustain me, since I myself, deformed,

had become an outcast in reality as I had been in fact. I remembered only that Hélenè had never told me that she loved me unless I had commanded the words from

her mouth. I remembered only that she had struck me, her white, absurd hand leveled at my eyes, and that

now I was

blind. I have told you that I was intoxicated with laughing when I thought of the scratch her rings had made in my forehead. And now and now, her telegram rests in my pocket. She has sum

moned me to

Paris. I am the happiest man in the world."

The pronouncement of these words ringing defiantly in our black compartment actually threw me forward from my corner in a literal

am driven to it. But in the devastating shaft of light from the open door I saw the Frenchman facing me in the compartment, his ribbons flaming on his

resistance to their impact. I think I myself was terrorized by their desperate faith, or I might have been shuddering before the realization of our sudden transit into the world to which we had returned. For the door of the compartment had swung open, and a porter was standing there, a white monster mouthing phrases in Spanish. It may have been that he had waited there for some time. I am not prepared to say. I do not understand the language unless I

breast, his glittering, motionless eyes upon me. His arms were spread out from each side of his body. It was the first movement he had made in our journey. His arms rested without pres

sure on the cushions supporting his back and his lifted head. It was a pose, no doubt, without character

or significance; but I perceived in it an attitude of crucifixion.

In the flash of the colored lamps wheeling by my window I witnessed the fatality of his gesture, the exaltation, the immortal posture of his spirit, if I may state it so, be

fore he had had time to rise to his feet, to pronounce an order to the porter, and mention in an even tone that we had come into San Sebastian.

I found myself standing in the narrow corridor of the train, stammering profuse, clumsy phrases into the ear of a Frenchman who bent slightly above me, his head formally inclined before the excesses of my incoherent protestations. I was even committing myself to a statement of the justice and the

injustice of my status at the frontier. I was rewarding his recital with a despairing formulation of my own wretched affairs. Before we stepped down from the corridor and with other people shoving in about us, he did me the courtesy to pose a sympathetic question and, looking steadfastly away from me, smiled his austere, brilliant smile.

I saw then the crowd of Latins impelled forward from the obscurity of the platform, a dark, secretive, volatile mass into which the personality of the man beside me was instantly absorbed; but even in this moment of my withdrawal I discerned the authority with which my fellow-voyager carried himself among

men.

When he had accompanied me until I was deposited in a conveyance in the very midst of a Spanish exhortation, I had the opportunity of seeing him wheel past in a dark, closed automobile with an orderly, or some such attendant, placed in an immobile pose of servile cordiality beside him. The brazen mob made way before the gold head-lights. There was an insignia of some magic character blazened on the panels of that

car.

Left to my own imaginings, I went to my hotel, wrote my name in the ledger, and ordered some food sent to my room. It was my wish to go to bed speedily and rest in the face of my morning's encounter with the consul. I reviewed the fantastic slip of paper which had been presented to me when my passport was held by the authorities of San Sebastian. I considered the thing which carried my photograph pasted in the upper corner. Then I laid it down beside the silver tray on my table, and without so much as unlocking my bags, sat by my window during the remaining hours of the night reviving the words of a nameless Frenchman. Before the portals of my hotel the emerald spaces of a silent sea lived more in my memory

than in my vision, I must say; but I regarded, with the dawn, the gracious contours of that flawless harbor and discovered the pale lights of a Latin gambling-house flourishing bravely above the silver embrace of a crescent shore.

I was, I confess, entirely unprepared for the brisk, commanding knock on my door which came almost with the first full blaze of the sunlight. Suffering under a fatigue wholly new in my experience, I opened the door, and received in silence the official envelop politely tendered into my hand.

I tore the seal without haste. The first of the inclosures was my passport, stamped with the three faded purple circles authorizing me to proceed without formality across the frontier. There was, also, a written request on the face of it desiring that I be shown an exceptional consideration.

The second inclosure was the card of a Frenchman who commands a diplomatic post second to none in the immense ramifications of his service. I read the engraved words, and they wavered before my eyes as if the very lightning of the fame which the world had already imparted to them brightened and electrified them in my hand.

But the third of my inclosures was a telegram. The green slip of paper had been neatly cut at the right and the left edge, and I saw, in an intense clairvoyance, the hand which had touched that conventional, crisp page. But I perceived this hand resting against the cushions of a railway compartment, discovered the drawn fingers outspread in a gesture of tortured supplication.

There were only two words in this telegram. I have read the despatch many times, but I have not yet plumbed the purity and the directness of its import. These were written, as I say, in large letters and they were:

"Je t'aime. Hélène."

A strong France means the regen

U

NTIL Germany forced us into the war public opinion was divided as to the advisability of getting inGeen volved in the European conflict. Most Americans knew little and cared less about what was going on in Europe. We had our prejudices and our sympathies. We condemned the invasion of Belgium and the way Germany was conducting the war, we resented the methods and the appeal of the German propaganda in the United States; but at the end of 1916 there were few who dared to prophesy that American intervention, even if it became necessary, would be popular. The astonishing events of the first months of 1917 demonstrated the absurdity of the belief in our lack of national unity. This belief was far more wide-spread in Europe than we dreamed of, and was fostered by Americans who had lived too long in exile or who had become plus royalistes que le roi in their championship of one or the other of the groups of belligerents. The American people did. not need to be whipped into line. Every measure placed before Congress by the President to make our belligerency effective received the immediate and unanimous approval of the nation. went into the war for all we were worth and were willing to consent to every sacrifice necessary to defeat Germany. We gave aid to France and our other allies to the full extent of our resources in man power, materials, and money.

We

But the war was won only in the narrowest sense of the word when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Whether the victory is to mean anything, whether it is to mark a permanent progress on the road toward democracy and world peace, depends upon what happens in

Α

France is the pivot upon which all turns. A strong France means the regeneration of Europe and the hope of a world peace for which we fought. weak France means the return of the old autocratic régime in central Europe and Germany triumphant, though beaten on the field of battle. Our obligation to France, our moral responsibility to "carry on," is as great now as it was when the A. E. F. was fighting over there.

Every news despatch from Europe is impregnated with the feeling of hopelessness and impending disaster. Pessimistic forebodings seem to be the order of the day. One cannot deny or minimize the dangers. But the rôle of Cassandra is as futile to play as it is easy to play. The crisis through which the world is passing calls for constructive thinking. We have to see foundations upon which to build, and be confident that we can build upon them. The disquieting radicalism that is capturing many of our best intellects assumes that the regeneration of the world depends upon the destruction of the existing social order. Do the foundations necessarily have to be new? Some political systems and organisms have crumbled, and others show serious fissures. Does unsuccessful building, however, prove that the foundations are responsible for instability? We have the most striking demonstration of the falsity of this reasoning in comparing Christ and His church. The great