I got out of the car on the boulevards. There were many people out and I went with the swing of the crowd up and down. It was good to be in the swing of a crowd. People hurried and people dallied; people stood and looked into shop windows; people sat and sipped things on café terraces; people pushed and elbowed; people stopped and stood where they were, reading the noon papers; strangers spoke to one another, if the swing of the crowd threw them for an instant together; everybody looked at one another with a queer new sudden need of each the other, and they all felt, more or less, one thing together. After a while I went to my own home. I thought I had never seen the Place de la Concorde more beautiful, oval and white, or crossed the bridge with a deeper sense of going home. My own little Place was very quiet, all the big houses closed; nobody left but the sentinels before the Palace and the concierges in their doorways with their cats and canaries. Our concierges and I were more glad even than usual to see one another. Old Boudet in his habitual shirt-sleeves, feeling, evidently, particularly socialistic, was yet quite tolerant of me; and sweet, slow, fat, very respectable mother Boudet, whose gentleness always seems begging one to excuse shirt-sleeves and politics, was so ready to cry that I kissed her. Our rooms were sad, things moved back and covered over, blinds closed. I did not stay long in those rooms. I did not try to see any one. It was not people I had wanted, only Paris. I started back early. I want to remember all the things of the way back into the country; every thing of the fields, red warm ploughed earth and fresh-cut grass and tall clover; every thing of the forests, lights and mists and shadows, depths of moss and fern; every thing of the villages, stone stairways and hearth fires, the pot-au-feu, cows and people's living. At Compiègne I stopped in the Grand' Place to read the news scrawled in chalk on the blackboard before the Mairie. A sense of things that were happening came to me less from the words on the bulletin than from the faces of the people in the crowd before it. Thursday, July 30th Early in the morning a friend of mine telephoned from her people's château across the two forests, to tell me that her husband was arranging for her to take the babies to-morrow up to Paris. He said that in '70 the Germans had come that way, by the grand old historic road, down upon Paris. The château had then passed through dreadful times. If there were war he would have to go out on the first day. He would have his babies then far off from the danger he did not, of course, believe in. She told me all he said. She thought it was a great bother. Would we come over that afternoon to tea? I picked sweet-peas and raspberries down by the well, and wrote a lot of letters in my north-tower room. That her husband felt like that about it, filled me with a sense of disaster--like the thunder and red I kept dreaming of.