At six o’clock that evening she was boarding the train for Washington, her cousin Maggie weeping by her side, Mrs. Wilson herself escorting her, very much excited by the momentousness of the event taking place under her roof, her satchel carried by none other than the young reporter, who, oddly enough, was not laughing at all. He bought her a box of chocolates and a magazine, and shook hands with her vigorously as the train started to pull out of the station. He heard himself saying, “Say, Miss Boardman, if you see anything for me to do over there, you might let me know,” and found that he must run to get himself off the train before it carried him away from Marshallton altogether. A fortnight from that day (passports were not so difficult to get in those distant days when war-relief work was the eccentricity of only an occasional individual) she was lying in her second-class cabin, as the steamer rolled in the Atlantic swells beyond Sandy Hook. She was horribly seasick, but her plans were all quite clear. Of course she belonged to the Young Women’s Christian Association in Marshallton, so she knew all about it. At Washington she had found shelter at the Y. W. C. A. quarters. In New York she had done the same thing, and when she arrived in Paris (if she ever did) she could of course go there to stay. Her roommate, a very sophisticated, much-traveled art student, was immensely amused by the artlessness of this plan. “I’ve got the _dernier cri_ in greenhorns in my cabin,” she told her group on deck. “She’s expecting to find a Y. W. C. A. in _Paris!_” But the wisdom of the simple was justified once more. There was a Y. W. C. A. in Paris, run by an energetic, well-informed American spinster. Ellen crawled into the rather hard bed in the very small room (the cheapest offered her) and slept twelve hours at a stretch, utterly worn out with the devastating excitement of her first travels in a foreign land. Then she rose up, comparatively refreshed, and with her foolish, ignorant simplicity inquired where in Paris her services could be of use. The energetic woman managing the Y. W. C. A. looked at her very dubiously. “Well, there might be something for you over on the rue Pharaon, number 27. I hear there’s a bunch of society dames trying to get up a _vestiaire_ for refugees, there.” As Ellen noted down the address she said warningly, her eyes running over Ellen’s worn blue serge suit: “They don’t pay anything. It’s work for volunteers, you know.” Ellen was astonished that any one should think of getting pay for work done in France. “Oh, gracious, no!” she said, turning away. The directress of the Y. W. C. A. murmured to herself: “Well, you certainly never can tell by _looks!_”