Of course, such an extraordinary phenomenon did not go unheeded by the sharp eyes of the elegant and cosmopolitan circle in Paris war-relief work. That circle had as well trained a predatory capacity for emptying fat pocketbooks as the prettiest girl who ever sold ten-cent bouquets for five dollars at a church fair. It was with something of the same smiling security in levying philanthropic blackmail that they began to close in on the Halls. I heard excited talk of them everywhere. Everybody's mouth watered at the stories of their "easiness" and plots to entrap them were laid by every cosmopolitan mondaine who now felt about her own pet "war-work" the same competitive pride she had had (and would have again as soon as the new fad was no longer new) for her collection of pet dogs, or Egyptian rings. A scouting party from another charitable institution, one of the very "chic" _oeuvres_, nosing around our institution to make sure they were losing no points in the game, stumbled on our new press and were as awestruck as I had been by its costliness and speed. After this, all the information which I had about the Halls, scanty and highly improbable as you will see it to have been, was repeatedly pumped from me by one past mistress after another in the art of pumping. I became so curious as to what the reaction of the Halls to this world would be, and as to what this world would make of the Halls, that one afternoon I took the time off to go to one of those horribly dull afternoon teas in which fashionably disposed charitable ladies made up for the absence of their usual pre-war distractions. I did not see the guests of honor at first, and stood dismally taking my tea, submerged in the talk customary at such affairs, for the most part complaints of war inconveniences ... the hardship it was to have so few taxis in Paris, how inconsiderate the Government had been to forbid cakes and candy on two days a week, how the tailors and dressmakers were profiting by the high prices to ask preposterous ones, "even of their old clients," how hard it was to get coal enough to have a fire in one's _cabinet de toilette_ ... it was one of the days when we had heard of the failure of a great French offensive, and of the terrible shortage of hospital supplies at the front! My tea and sandwiches were ashes in my mouth! Through the window I saw a one-armed soldier with his head in bandages hobbling by the house, and I found myself bitterly longing for a bolt from heaven to descend and consume the whole worthless lot of us. Then I caught sight of the Halls.