To the _popote_ at eight. Six Protestant pastors had been announced to dine with us, two of mine in the act of being convoyed through Alsace by four of theirs. The Americans were “looking over the ground,” they delicately informed me. I didn’t ask “what ground”; with my name it might have sounded argumentative, which I never, never am. Now during these days of my Alsatian visit I had thought, at intervals, that it might very possibly be a nuisance to have a woman always tagging at some polite heel or other, but when I saw that six pastors could happen to them all at once, I then and there ceased forever feeling apologetic. I even fell to thinking that they hadn’t done so badly when they got me. I can’t say that, at dinner, all went as merry as a marriage feast, because the Americans didn’t speak French, nor the officers English, except de Maroussem, who could but didn’t, even seeming but remotely interested in watching them consume the plenteous repast. And as for myself, I was too dull with fatigue and too spent with the emotions of the Hartmann to be able to do any “paying in person.” For a time, too, those men of my race were the strangers to me, not the blue-clad men of the Mission. Suddenly, as we were unsuspectingly taking our coffee, one of the shepherds began saying prayers over us with a drop in his voice after each sentence, thanking God for their being there, for our being there, for Alsace being there, and I don’t remember what else, save that it was fairly comprehensive. After which everybody signed everybody’s menu, and then as they were on the run through the garden of Alsace, lingering nowhere, though scattering possibly seedless blessings everywhere, they said good-by and went out forever into the rain. And they ought to have thanked God for the dinner, which was a triumph, with vintage wines served by two orderlies, under Monsieur de Maroussem’s chic though somewhat detached eye. As the door closed we fell to talking as people would when six clergymen who came all at once leave all at once, though unexpectedly one came back for his umbrella—producing a momentary hush. One of mine had generously given me several boxes of cigarettes, produced from deep, sagging pockets, and we stopped to have an “evangelical puff” as some one called it, while I tried to explain what “nervous prostration” is to those Frenchmen—and to explain why the largest of the American clergymen, very nice, and looking like a lion-tamer, as some one remarked, could have had it, and been in bed with it, for a year. “_Chacun a sa petite misère_,” one of them said, “_mais c’est étrange, tout de même._”