Kendall was not frightened; he was hardly apprehensive. Even when the guns opened toward the north and he could see bright star-flashes as shrapnel burst high above, he was only exhilarated and very interested. The thing did not seem serious to him. But it _was_ serious, he knew. It was war, and such barbarous war as held the world in a spell of horror. Presently the air was filled with the crashes of cannon, and one could trace the course of the enemy by the spreading of the ring of fire about the city.... Once in a while would come a deep, dull, thunderous _boom_, as a bomb, released by a _Gotha_, would fall in the distant suburbs, perhaps upon the home of some laborer, burying himself with his wife and babies in the ruins, or destroying them utterly so that no trace of their human shell would ever be discovered.... The firing moved westward, and then swung around to the south as the hostile aeroplanes strove vainly to penetrate the city.... This continued for half an hour. Then there was a time of quietness, after which came the pleasant voices of bugles notifying a cowering population that all was clear.... The raid had been abortive—it had succeeded in killing only half a dozen defenseless civilians! Kendall and Stanley walked back to the Union—to have another dish of ice-cream. As they walked up-stairs in the darkness Kendall said to his friend: “I wonder who that girl was ... the one in the restaurant. Her name was Andree.” CHAPTER III Kendall Ware had been two weeks in Paris; he had learned many things, absorbed many things, but as his observations grew he discovered depths to his ignorance that were not apparent to him on the day of his arrival. The greatest advance he made in those first weeks was in arriving at a knowledge of how little he understood or was equipped to understand of France—and when he said _France_ he did not mean a country, but the people who inhabited the country. Continually he was amused by superficialities; daily he was impressed by profundities. Gradually he came to perceive that one cannot know France by looking at the surface any more than one can gather a knowledge of what is transpiring in the ocean by sailing a little boat over its waves. A people which can produce Joan of Arc and Robespierre, a St. Louis and a Louis the Eleventh, a Madame Roland and a Madame du Barry, a Clemenceau and a Calliaux; which is capable of an 1870 and of a 1914, of the Terror and of Verdun—is not one whose complexities can be solved by a twenty-six-year-old American in fourteen days.... The American will make no impression on France, but France will make a profound impression on the American. From being interested in a city, in its buildings and its beauties, Kendall became interested in its people.