Polly led her to a welcoming room that would have been quite pretty enough if it had had only a bed and a chair. Marie Louise felt as if she had come out of the wilderness into a city of refuge. Polly had an engagement, a committee meeting of women war-workers, and would not be back until luncheon-time. Marie Louise steeped herself in a hot tub, then in a long sweet sleep in a real bed. She was wakened by the voices of children, and looked out from her window to see the Widdicombe tots drilling in a company of three with a drum, a flag, and a wooden gun. The American army was not much bigger compared with the European nations in arms, but it would grow. Polly came home well charged with electricity, the new-woman idea that was claiming half of the war, the true squaw-spirit that takes up the drudgery at home while the braves go out to swap missiles with the enemy. When Marie Louise said that she, too, had come to Washington to get into harness somewhere, Polly promised her a plethora of opportunities. At luncheon Polly was reminded of the fact that a photographer was coming over from Washington. He had asked for sittings, and she had acceded to his request. "I never can get photographs enough of my homely self," said Polly. "I'm always hoping that by some accident the next one will make me look as I want to look--make ithers see me as I see mysel'!" When the camera-man arrived Polly insisted that Marie Louise must pose, too, and grew so urgent that she consented at last, to quiet her. They spent a harrowing afternoon striking attitudes all over the place, indoors and out, standing, sitting, heads and half-lengths, profile and three-quarters and full face. Their muscles ached with the struggle to assume and retain beatific expressions on an empty soul. The consequences of that afternoon of self-impersonation were far-reaching for Marie Louise. According to the Washingtonian custom, one of the new photographs appeared the following Sunday in each of the four newspapers. The Sunday after that Marie Louise's likeness appeared with "Dolly Madison's" and Jean Elliott's syndicated letters on "The Week in Washington" in Sunday supplements throughout the country. Every now and then her likeness popped out at her from _Town and Country_, _Vogue_, _Harper's Bazaar_, _The Spur_, what not? One of those countless images fell into the hands of Jake Nuddle, who had been keeping an incongruous eye on the Sunday supplements for some time. This time the double of Mamise was not posed as a farmerette in an English landscape, but as a woman of fashion in a Colonial drawing-room. He hurried to his wife with the picture, and she called it "Mamise" with a recrudescent anguish of doubt. "She's in this country now, the paper says," said Jake. "She's in Washington, and if I was you I'd write her a little letter astin' her is she our sister."