The luncheon served at this canteen was as dainty, and it was perhaps even more carefully composed, than an expensive repast in a Fifth avenue tea room. The rich lady and her American guest sat down and ate it with the girls from the munitions factory a block away, and we enjoyed it as much as they did. Every American woman knows the beautifully embroidered French underwear, which over here is rather expensive but in France could once be purchased for very little. The Paris “white sales” before the war was the trade event of the year for women. But what few women took into consideration when buying this lovely underwear so cheaply was that the women who made the garments received appallingly low wages for their work. The underwear was made by women working at home. Pride kept them from leaving home, and besides, there were often young children to care for. So the home workers toiled far into the night, sewing and embroidering the dainty things that were to adorn the soft bodies of richer women. For their long toil they often received less than a franc a day. I met the woman who was chiefly responsible for the alleviation of this great blot on the civilization of France. Her name is Madame Viollet, and she has devoted her life to the problems of the poor, in much the same wholehearted way as Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Lillian Wald and other well-known American women have. Like them she lives with her poor. The problem of the home worker was long her chief province, and since the war she has succeeded in having a minimum wage law passed through the French Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, giving to the women who work at home four or five times as much as they ever received before. “I do not wish all women to work in factories,” she said to me. “Expectant mothers, women with young children, delicate women, ought to stay at home. And, since they must earn, it is the business of the state to see that they are not cheated.” Not only did Madame Viollet secure for the home workers a minimum wage, she organized them into a _syndicat_, or union, to enforce the law, and to raise their own status in various ways. This was a remarkable thing to do, because French women are totally unused to the idea of trade unions. The men rarely admit them to their unions, and the strong woman labor leader of England and the United States is practically unknown. But the home workers are organized now, and after the war we shall pay more for our French embroidered underwear. CHAPTER XXV BY WAY OF DIVERSION I shall never hear that musical classic, _Where Do We Go From Here?_, without remembering a young lieutenant I tried to be a mother to in France. I really led the young man terribly astray, and but for a bit of luck at the end I might have got him court-martialed.