In another pavilion of this house I saw another group of girls much better off. They had lived through horrors, but their health was somehow preserved. The youngest of these girls was twelve years old, and the hideous thing had happened to her two years ago. I think I have never seen a more tragic figure than this little girl. Her face was white and solemn and her eyes were old. She seldom spoke. While we were looking at the sewing work and some of the girls were busy making us tea, a friend of the house came in to play the piano for the girls to sing. This is her regular contribution to the work. They sang, these poor little larks, standing around the piano, sang of home and love and all things beautiful. I sat and listened and thought of peaceful America, where the war is still little more than an abstraction, a fact hardly realized except by the mothers and fathers and wives of men who have gone over. Perhaps it was unworthy of a reporter, but the sight of these young French girls who have been forced, in the most ghastly fashion possible, to realize what this war means, was, for the moment, more than I could bear. I slipped away and ran to the farthest end of the enclosed garden. Out of the sound of their voices I sat down and let the most unbearable part of the pain flow away in tears. As I sat there on that garden bench I heard a little soft exclamation. Looking up I saw the youngest girl, the little one who at ten years had had her life wrecked by a Hunnish criminal, more than one, for all I know. This child with the white solemn face and the old eyes stood there, pitying me for a trouble she did not understand. But for her there was only one trouble, and she assumed that I was weeping for that. She reached out a timid little hand and laid it on mine. “Ah, madame,” she whispered, “is it not terrible, the war?” It is terrible, but it has brought to the surface a heroism and a grandeur of soul that few of us knew the French people possessed. I asked Madame de Ste. Croix to tell me of the women and girls who had borne children to the German invaders. “What will you do with those boche babies?” I asked her. “We shall assimilate them,” she said proudly. And she added that the mothers, married or unmarried, as a rule loved their forlorn little babes. “I have known only two women who wished to get rid of their children,” she assured me. Nature is stronger than convention. The heart of woman is a mother heart, and nothing can ever change it. It was man and not woman who invented the myth of the illegitimate child. Yet over there in France, even the men have risen above that harsh and cruel tradition. Madame de Ste. Croix, who takes on herself the painful duty of telling men what happened to their women when the Germans came, told me how nobly and bravely French men have stood by and sheltered them.