The whole thing, from the first, had been Susan's idea, and she was to have charge of it all--once the required plant was ready--as became its creator. But indeed, in the interim, she had simply taken charge of our Red Cross architects and buyers and builders and engineers, and was sweeping things forward with a tactful but exceedingly high hand. She meant that the interim should be, if possible, brief. "I want results," said Susan; "we can discuss the rules we've broken afterward. The children are fading out _now_, and some of them will be dead or hopelessly withered before we can aid them. Let's get some kind of home and get it running; with a couple of good doctors, an orthopedist, a dental expert, and the right nurses--and I'll pick _them_, please!--we can make out somehow, 'most anywhere." There was no standing against her. It was presently plain to all of us in the Paris headquarters that this nursing home was to be put through, in record time, Germans or no Germans, and no matter who fell by the wayside! And, in spite of my natural anxiety, I was soon convinced that whoever fell, it would not be Susan--not, at least, till the clear flame of her spirit had burned out the oil of her energy to its last granted drop. In the rare intervals of these labors, she was arranging for the legal adoption of James Aulard Kane. No step of this kind is easily arranged in bureaucratic France. It is a difficult land to be legally born in or married in, or to die in--if one wishes to do these things, at least, with a certain decency, _en règle_. Susan complained to me of this, wittily scornful, as we left the Red Cross headquarters together on the evening of March eleventh, and started toward her hotel down the dusky colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli. "I'm worn out with them all!" she exclaimed. "All I want is to take care of Jimmy's baby, and you'd think I was plotting to upset the government. I shall, too, if some of these French officials don't presently exhibit more common sense. It _ought_ to be upset--and simplified. Oh, I wish I lived in a woman's republic, Ambo! Things would happen there, even if they were wrong! No woman has patience enough to be bureaucratic." "True," I chimed; "and you're right about men, all round. We're hopeless incompetents at statecraft and such things, at running a reasonable world--but we _can_ cook! And what you need for a change from all this is a good dinner--a real dinner! It will renew your faith in the eternal masculine--and we haven't had a bat, Susan, or talked nonsense, for years and years! Come on, dear! Let's have a perfectly shameless bat to-night and damn the consequences! What do you say?" "I say--damn the consequences, Ambo! Let's! Why, I'd forgotten there was such a thing as a bat left in the world!" "But there is! Look--there's even a taxi to begin on!"