She did not wish one of her clients, in the semi-obscurity of a cave, to be mistaken for a sack of potatoes, nor yet to be trodden on by an excited new arrival. She sought a color which should be neutral and yet outstanding, and she found it in a tint she called “_chaudron_,” the identification of which I shall have to leave to the experts. It must be a very nice color, however. If you should have to hide in a coal cellar, it was said, the contact with the coal will not injure your appearance, but will paint your cellar gown with lovely Rembrandt effects. Moreover, the hood of this _robe au chaudron_ is lined with some soft, tender color, which will lend beauty to the countenance of the wearer, and presumably make the cold and discomfort easier to endure. I never descended to the caves during the air raid, preferring to take my chances on a lower floor. But if I did feel constrained to seek a wine cave, or a coal cellar while boche bombs were hurtling through the atmosphere, I admit I might like to wear something becoming. Anyhow, as long as the French go on making their lives beautiful in spite of air raids and guns that shoot seventy miles, in spite of devastating German hordes in the north and a war that shows small signs of abating, I think they prove themselves bad to beat, and allies we ought to be proud to claim. Another thing I admired in the French was their constant sense of humor. They laughed at the Germans. The big gun, full of hate as it was, furnished a subject of jest. The cartoonist drew caricatures of it that were full of wit. When one of the guns burst, killing, as it must have, a number of German gunners, a cartoonist pictured the inventor pointing to a miscellaneous collection of arms and legs which decorated the landscape, saying proudly: “You see, super-colonel, how kolossaly powerful my kanon is. It is as deadly at one end as it is at the other!” The Parisians found this irresistibly comic. They laughed scornfully at the solemn lies published in the German papers regarding the alleged panic their bombardment was creating. I have seen men and women sitting outside the cafés in the Rue Royale and on the boulevards, sipping their _apéritifs_ before dinner and enjoying these exaggerations, as reprinted in the Paris papers. They smiled and chuckled over the news announced in the Stuttgart _Neues Tageblatt_ that Paris would soon be a mass of ruins; that even the working class population no longer had the hardihood to remain. The roads leading to Tours, Orleans, Lyons, cities of the south, were crowded with interminable convoys, vehicles drawn by horses, donkeys and even dogs. Sick women were being transported in baby carriages. The forest of Fontainbleau was one vast camp of refugees.