_Monday, November 4th._—Dreamed of old griefs and awakened with the heavy taste their memory can even now distil. Raining. The yellow-and-brown carpet under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre is wet and dull and the few leaves still on the trees are soft and heavy, the houses damp and shabby. “The old wounds burn,” even here, where all is new and bright, and fancy flings itself delicately, amorously, consolingly about the pleasant happenings of each day.... Fortunately my breakfast is brought early by a smiling maid, who enters, bringing with her the aroma of fresh tea and the delicately scented, dark-green, liquid honey of these pine forests. There is that blessed volatilization of night-grief, and I arise to another pleasant day, knowing once again, however, that everywhere the old ghosts find one.... The rainy light coming in seems but to darken the oak-paneled room. What there is of wall-paper is a darkish blue with a narrow frieze of red. The curtains are stripes of red-and-blue cloth. Even the daytime cover of the very comfortable eider-downed bed is of the same red-and-blue-striped stuff. It was because they were the colors of the French uniform that the young man once living herein, under German rule, chose them. But he himself is gone, gone the hope of his house. One of his sisters was saying to me last night as I tarried for a few minutes in the little sitting-room, where I had first found them all rehanging the portraits of their ancestors: “The price for peace is so high and terrifying that one can’t yet rejoice in it. Rather one says to oneself in desolation, ‘and all that was so precious is gone, that in the end one may sit around deserted fireplaces, or try to find shelter under bombarded roofs, and be at grips with the terrible _après-guerre_!’” And of her brother: “At least he fell for the cause that is so dear to us;” she added after a moment’s silence, “it might so easily have been otherwise.” I have noticed everywhere a great pride tempering grief over fallen beloved dead. Even in mothers’ hearts this pride is strong enough to console. They know why their sons were born, and to many a death of glory has been as a second birth; he whom they lost is, in some way, laid a second time, bright, beautiful, complete, in their arms, and _safe_ from life. And they are blessed who so mourn. Sometimes there are further griefs. I knew a mother of twin sons; one had fallen far away, a gentle, young, musician son, in a fierce, unequal conflict, whose details she was not spared; the other had been brought back to her on his twenty-first birthday a sightless stump. I cannot forget her as she stood, tall, black-veiled, by a pillared door, like an antique statue of grief, her eyes as dry as marble eyes. And though she, too, said: “At least I know why I bore them, and it was for something more than myself,” the obsession of a further grief was in her eyes as she added, “_I must not die first_—and he is so young!”