police arrive, I shall be gone! In the morning paper a week or so afterward I read one day of an earl's daughter even, who had been arrested and fined 25 pounds for "permitting a beam of light to escape from her window."
The government is regulating everything, the icing a housewife may not put on a cake, the number of courses one may have for dinner, even the conversation at table. Let an American with the habit of free speech beware! Notices conspicuously posted in public places advise, "Silence." In France they put it most picturesquely, "Say nothing. Be suspicious. The ears of the enemy are always open." Absolutely the only safe rule, then, is to learn to hold your tongue. Everybody's doing it over here. Very well, I will not talk. But what about all the rest of this silent world that will not, either? For those under military orders, the rule is absolute. And you've no idea how many people are under military orders. This is a war with even the women in khaki. I begin to feel that to get into so much as a drawing-room, I ought to have my merely social letter of introduction crossed with some kind of a visé. Wouldn't a hostess, even the Duchess of Marlborough, be able to be more cordial if she knew that I had seen the Government before I saw her? Even the girl conductor on the 'bus this morning, when I essayed to ask her as Exhibit 1 in the new-woman-in-industry I was looking for, how she liked her job, turned and scurried down her staircase like a frightened rabbit.
