At the rue Pharaon, number 27, Ellen was motioned across a stony gray courtyard littered with wooden packing-cases, into an immense, draughty dark room, that looked as though it might have been originally the coach and harness-room of a big stable. This also was strewed and heaped with packing-cases in indescribable confusion, some opened and disgorging innumerable garments of all colors and materials, others still tightly nailed up. A couple of elderly workmen in blouses were opening one of these. Before others knelt or stood distracted-looking, elegantly dressed women, their arms full of parti-colored bundles, their eyes full of confusion. In one corner, on a bench, sat a row of wretchedly poor women and white-faced, silent children, the latter shod more miserably than the poorest negro child in Marshallton. Against a packing-case near the entrance leaned a beautifully dressed, handsome, middle-aged woman, a hammer in one hand. Before her at ease stood a pretty girl, the fineness of whose tightly drawn silk stockings, the perfection of whose gleaming coiffure, the exquisite hang and fit of whose silken dress filled Ellen Boardman with awe. In an instant her own stout cotton hose hung wrinkled about her ankles, she felt on her neck every stringy wisp of her badly dressed hair, the dip of her skirt at the back was a physical discomfort. The older woman was speaking. Ellen could not help overhearing. She said forcibly: “No, Miss Parton, you will not come in contact with a single heroic poilu here. We have nothing to offer you but hard, uninteresting work for the benefit of ungrateful, uninteresting refugee women, many of whom will try to cheat and get double their share. You will not lay your hand on a single fevered masculine brow....” She broke off, made an effort for self-control and went on with a resolutely reasonable air: “You’d better go out to the hospital at Neuilly. You can wear a uniform there from the first day, and be in contact with the men. I wouldn’t have bothered you to come here, except that you wrote from Detroit that you would be willing to do _any_thing, scrub floors or wash dishes.” The other received all this with the indestructible good humor of a girl who knows herself very pretty and as well dressed as any one in the world. “I know I did, Mrs. Putnam,” she said, amused at her own absurdity. “But now I’m here I’d be _too_ disappointed to go back if I hadn’t been working for the soldiers. All the girls expect me to have stories about the work, you know. And I can’t stay very long, only four months, because my coming-out party is in October. I guess I _will_ go to Neuilly. They take you for three months there, you know.” She smiled pleasantly, turned with athletic grace and picked her way among the packing-cases back to the door. Ellen advanced in her turn. “Well?” said the middle-aged woman, rather grimly. Her intelligent eyes took in relentlessly every detail of Ellen’s costume and Ellen felt them at their work.