It is an easy matter to satirize the heroic and theatrical gesture. The French themselves did it. Once in the Chamber of Deputies, late in the war, a Radical member, who didn't care much for the war, anyway, and still less for the Cabinet, arose and said: "This morning as I was walking in the streets of Paris a little before dawn I saw three camions headed for the front, and I stopped the first driver and said, 'Ah, I am overjoyed to see that at last the ministry is awake to the needs of our brave poilus and is sending supplies to the front. What is it that you carry--ammunition, clothing, food?' But the driver shook his head and said, 'No; Croix de Guerre.'" But the satire does not cut too deeply, for Croix de Guerre played just as important a part in winning the war as food or ammunition or clothing. I heard a French colonel once cry to a crowd of prisoners returned from Germany, broken and ill: "Now, let us hear you shout that which it has been so long forbidden to you to say, 'Vive la France!'" And as he spoke his arm shot up into the air and his voice rang like a trumpet call, and everybody within sound of the man straightened up and thrilled as if he had just heard of a great victory. It was fine art for all the fact that it was probably also sincere. No, when Napoleon had himself crowned in Nôtre Dame it was not, as Wells says, "Just a ridiculous scene." Napoleon realized that a play can be staged in a cathedral or upon a battlefield just as well as in a theater, and that man, who may come in time to be the superman of whom Wells dreams is still a little boy sitting in the gallery, ready to applaud and to shout for any dressed-up person who knows how to walk to the center of the stage and hold it. Promises and Contracts and Clocks "I am one of those people," says the flapper in _Beauty and Mary Blair_, "to whom life is a very great puzzle. So many people seem to get used to living, but I don't. I can't seem to get up any really satisfactory philosophy or find anybody or anything to help me about it. I want everything, little or big, fixed up in mind before I can proceed. "Even as a very small child I always wanted my plans made in advance. Once, when mother had a bad sick headache, I sat on the edge of her bed and begged her to tell me if she thought she was going to die, so if she was I could plan to go and live with my Aunt Margaret. I was an odious infant, but all the same, I really wanted to know, and that's the way I am to this day! I want to know what the probabilities are, in order to act accordingly."