and ease into the place of toil and privation and self-sacrifice at the Vosges front where her country had need of her.
That was, I think, the last time a maid has done anything for her for whom up to that day in August there had been servants to answer her least request. Ever since then the Viscountess D'Azy has been doing things with her own hands for the soldiers of France. It was in the second year of the war that a gentleman of France, General Joffre, bent to kiss her small hand, now toil-hardened and not so white as it used to be. There is a military group in front of a hospital that she commands and they stand directly before a great jagged hole in the wall torn there by a German bomb, which, as it fell, missed her by a few metres. The General is giving her the "accolade," and on the front of her white uniform he has pinned the Croix de Guerre of France for distinguished service. Last year, on behalf of her grateful country, the Minister of War conferred on her another decoration, the Médaille de Vermeil des Epidémies. I do not know what others may have been added since to these with which the front of her white blouse sagged last spring in Paris.
But the woman thus cited for military honours had before this Armageddon as little expectation of playing any such rôle as have you to-day who are, say, the social leader of the four hundred in Los Angeles or the president of a foreign missionary society in Bangor, Maine. Her one preparation was that two months' course of Red Cross lectures.
