WAR AS YOU FIRST SEE IT
Here in Paris I stand in the boulevards as I stood in the Strand and Oxford Street, and watch the new woman movement going by. Every time a man drops dead in the trenches, a woman steps permanently into the niche he used to hold in industry, in commerce, in the professions, in world affairs. It is the woman movement for which the ages have waited in ghastly truth. But, O God in Heaven, the price we pay! The price we pay! There is Madelaine La Fontaine, whom I saw yesterday in the Rue Renouard. Her black dress outlined her figure against the yellow garden wall where she stood in a little doorway. She leaned and kissed her child on his way to school. As she lifted her head, I saw the grief in her eyes and the dead man's picture in the locket at her throat.
They are everywhere through England and France, these women with the locket at their throats. Yet not for these would your heart ache most. There are the others, the clear-eyed girls in their 'teens just now coming up into long dresses. And life may not offer them so much as the pictured locket! There will be no man's face to fill it! Love that would have been, you see, lies slain there with all the bright boyhood that's falling on the battlefields. O God, the price we pay!
How far off now seems that summer's day I walked through 39th Street, my pulses throbbing pleasantly with the thrill of adventure and this
