Met to-day two Englishwomen coming out of the hospital. One, nearing sixty, had something ardent in her charming blue eyes and under austerely brushed whitening hair; there was a suggestion of banked fires—banked under ashes of circumstance, probably, as well as time. The other, somewhat younger, in the full grip of _l’âge dangereux_, had something inexorable in her regard. When we passed on I asked who they were, and found they were daily doers of acts of mercy and devotion, and then I found myself looking for eternal reasons in transient things, under the impression made by those two women—met only in passing, but whose emanations I suddenly caught. And I thought: Among the innumerable phenomena of the war are these women of various ages (though the phenomenon is most apparent between thirty-five and sixty), brought for the first time into personal contact with man, other than father or brother, ministering to his wants, witness of his agonies, awed spectator of his continual apotheosis, and all the daily transmutations of the definite and ordinary into the infinite and divine. The world war gives the one chance for the twisting of conventional fives, lived along the straightest of fines, into completely unexpected shapes. They come from abodes of hitherto unescapable virginities, these elemental women of indescribable innocence, with that warm, wondering look, or sometimes that determined and inexorable look, upon their faces, these unchosen and unmated, to become part of the strange lining of the war, part of the vast patchwork. Not the least strange are these pale, thin bits, sewn into something riotous, reckless, multicolored, heroic. It’s a far cry from Shepherd’s Bush or Clapham Junction or Stepney Green to battle-fields, hospitals, vanishings, potent reminders of forces withdrawn forever from the world-sum, or, still more, of convalescences and evocations of returning forces, but _not_ re-established order. Everywhere the subtle but deathless emanation of the male—his heroisms, his agonies, his needs, his weakness, and his strength. Can one wonder at the mighty tide obeying nameless natural laws, like other tides, that flood the areas where the manhood of the world is concentrated?