Dr. Small spoke to me. “That girl is scared of something. The poor child has got the jim-jams.” I went closer to her and heard her breathing. It was quite loud. It was as though she were panting after hard running. “Are you ill?” I asked. She did not answer until the group of civilians had passed. They did not pass at once, but stood for a moment looking up at a light burning in an upper window. One of the men shouted something in a loud voice--some word in _argot_--which I did not understand, and the women screeched with laughter. Then they went on, dancing with linked arms, and our two soldiers in the women’s hats lurched along with them. “I am afraid!” said the girl. “Afraid of what?” I asked. I repeated the question--“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?”--and she answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery. “_C’est la guerre!_” “Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.” She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed, and would have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell, indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden weight--though she was of slight build--and they sank together in a kind of huddle on the doorstep. “For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before her now, chafing her cold hands. She came to in about a minute, and I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed fingers--“cold as a toad,” said “Daddy” Small--she fumbled at her bodice and drew out a latchkey. “We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded. The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy banisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a little now, and managed to get her to the first landing. “Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.” It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of it the poverty of the furniture and its untidiness. At one end of the room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats and blouses. There was a small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that mirror vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the right-hand corner of the looking-glass.