When we had seen her last, just before the war, she could have stood for the very type and symbol of the intelligent, modern woman; an energetic leader for good in her native town (a bustling industrial center in the north of France); unsentimental, beneficent; looking at life with clear, brightly observant, disillusioned eyes; rather quick to laugh at old-fashioned narrowness; a little inclined to scoff at too fervently expressed enthusiasms, such as patriotism; very broad in her sympathies, very catholic in her tastes, tolerant as to the beliefs of others, radical as to her own, above all, a thoroughgoing internationalist; physically in the prime of her life, with a splendid, bold vigor in all her movements. Now, after less than three years of separation, she sat before us, white-haired, gaunt, shabby, her thin face of a curious grayish brown which none of us had ever seen before, her thin hands tightly clasped, her eyes burning and dry--the only dry eyes in the room as she talked. * * * * * Much of what she told us I may not repeat, for she said, with a quick gesture of terror, dreadful to see in one who for forty years had faced life so indomitably: "No, no, don't publish what I say--or at least be very careful; choose only those things that can't hurt the people who are up there, still in 'their' power." "Why not publish what you say?" I asked her, rather challengingly. "I don't think people in general understand half enough what the life of the invaded provinces is. One never sees any really detailed descriptions of it." She answered bitterly, "Doesn't the reason for that silence occur to you?" "No, it doesn't. I never have understood why so little is given to the public about the sufferings of the invaded populations."