A little later, when Madame Curie and I had embarked for America, where she was to receive her radium and other experimental material, I asked her if, the day I had first given her the promise, she had believed that American women would rally to her aid. "No," she confessed honestly, "but I knew you were sincere." About the time of her marriage, one of her relatives gave Madame Curie a gift of money to be used for a trousseau. It was not a great sum, but important to the poor student in Paris. To understand the significance of the use to which she put this fund, it is necessary to remember that Marie Sklodowska was young, and possessed physical beauty and charm. She was not without appreciation of the beautiful, and she could not possibly have been utterly unconscious of her own appearance. She had a young girl's natural interest in pretty clothes. She considered the purchase of a wedding gown and other personal belongings, and then, with her characteristic exactness, measured her needs and the future. She was married in a simple dress she had brought from Poland, and her trousseau fund was spent on two bicycles, so that she and Pierre Curie might enjoy the beautiful country of France. That was their honeymoon. One dream that Madame Curie held, and still holds unrealized, is the hope of a quiet little home of her own with a garden and hedge, and flowers and birds. During her American travels, she would frequently glance through the window as the train passed through a small town, and, spying some modest little house with a garden, would say, "I have always wanted such a little home." But owning a house was secondary in the life of both Pierre and Marie Curie. They simply made a home wherever they lived, for such money as might have gone for the purchase of her little dream house was always needed in the laboratory. She told me one day, with deep feeling, that one of the regrets of her life was that Pierre Curie had died without ever having had a permanent laboratory. She had, as I have said, refused opportunities to come to the United States because she could not endure separation from her children. She was, I think, finally persuaded to face the long trip and the terrifying publicity attending it, partly because of her gratitude for the support given her scientific work, but principally because it offered a splendid opportunity for travel to her daughters. There is in Madame Curie none of the legendary coldness and thoughtlessness attributed to the scientist. During the war, when she ran her own radiological truck and lived on the march from hospital to hospital in the zone of operations, she washed and dried and pressed her own clothes. Once during our American travels, we stayed in a home where there were several other house guests besides our party of five. I entered Madame Curie's room and found her washing her underclothes.