Accustomed to grope and flounder in the mazes of the intellect, I found her intelligence well-nigh terrifying. I would sit almost helplessly and listen to her sparkle of talk. Her freedom knocked into pieces all my little imagined world of French conventionalities and inhibitions. How could this pale, dignified mother, to whom I was presented as she passed hurriedly through the room one day, allow her to wander so freely about Paris parks and museums with a foreign young man? Her answer came superbly, with a flare of decision which showed me that at least in one spot the eternal conflict of the generations had been settled: “_Je me permets!_”--I allow myself. She gave me to understand that for a while her mother had been difficult, but that there was no longer any question of her “living her life”--_vivre sa vie_. And she really thought that her mother, in releasing her from the useless trammels, had become herself much more of an independent personality. As for my friend, she dared, she took risks, she played with the adventure of life. But she knew what was there. The motherly Anglo-Saxon frame of mind would come upon me, to see her in the light of a poor ignorant child, filled with fantastic ideals, all so pitifully untested by experience. How ignorant she was of life, and to what pitfalls her daring freedom must expose her in this unregenerate France! I tried and gave it up. As she talked,--her glowing eyes, in which ideas seemed to well up brimming with feeling and purpose, saying almost more than her words,--she seemed too palpably a symbol of luminous youth, a flaming militant of the younger generation, who by her courage would shrivel up the dangers that so beset the timorous. She was French, and that fact by itself meant that whole layers of equivocation had been cut through, whole sets of intricacies avoided. In order to get the full shock of her individuality, I took her one afternoon to a model little English tea-room on the rue de Rivoli, where normal Britishers were reading _Punch_ and the _Spectator_ over their jam and cake. The little flurry of disapprobation and the hostile stare which our appearance elicited from the well-bred families and discreet young men at the tables, the flaring incongruity of her dark, lithe, inscrutable personality in this bland, vacuous British atmosphere, showed me as could nothing else how hard was the gem-like flame with which she burned.