Out of Lunéville over the muddy Vesouze, through the Place Brûlée, and onto a pasty road, E. M. driving, and, on the back seat, newly wedded love. As we left the town a dwarf made a face at us and then turned his back on us with a not over-elegant gesture, for all the world like the tales of the famous dwarf Bébé, during years the delight of the Court of Stanislas. Mustard and osier plantings became the intensest yellow or red, as the sun fell on them through rifts in dark clouds, and many women, old men, and children were working in wet beet-root fields, among little groupings of black crosses.... We got into Vitrimont through streets deep in mud. Such a change! Before reaching it, instead of the skeleton outline of homes one now sees orderly rows of red roofs. The work that had seemed almost stationary, pursued with so much difficulty by Comtesse de B. (Miss Polk), had got suddenly to a point where it began to show, though the finished houses will be too damp for habitation this winter, and, like a lot of other things, must await the spring. Everywhere in the streets the busy work of reconstruction is proceeding. Soldiers billeted in Vitrimont are coming and going, helping with masonry, bringing in great wagons of beet-root, as if they had always lived there; not _en passant par la Lorraine_. It’s a very human document, this billeting of soldiers; though, as far as they are concerned, when they leave a village they only change their residence. For the women the thing is much more serious. _They_ get a change of regiment. However, I have no time to muse on this detail of the war. Things in Vitrimont were simply taking their inevitable course. Nothing is held back for long, with the generations pressing thick and fast. Black-aproned children with books on their backs, to whom E. M. gave little slabs of chocolate, were coming from the new school-house. Old men were hobbling about, and women bending over embroidery frames, in houses often half destroyed and hastily roofed over. In the old days Lorraine furnished beautiful damasks and gold galloons and laces to Paris and Versailles. We stopped by a window where a thin-faced woman was just taking from its frame a beautiful beaded bag such as one would buy very, very dear in the Rue de la Paix. Near her sat an old woman, her mother, the light falling on her pale, withered face, wearing a great black-bowed head-dress, a yellow cat in her lap. It was an _intérieur_ that would have done honor to any great museum.