Kendall regarded her. She was a little thing with clear eyes and a rather pretty face, whose cheeks, as she pointed out, were guiltless of paint. She was not well dressed, though she was neat, _chic_. And she was so young.... It was apparent to him that she told the truth, and his manner changed toward her. They talked. It was a conversation which would have aroused the mirth of a listener ... but it was remarkable how well each made the other understand; she with slowly pronounced French and a few words of quaint English—he with his small stock of atrociously articulated French.... She worked in a chocolate-shop. She was a refugee from Soissons and an orphan. Her two brothers had been killed at Verdun and her mother and father had died of the war. “Now I must make to work,” she said, simply. “But I am very _solitaire, monsieur.... Oui, je suis trés-solitaire—trés-solitaire_.” “Poor kid!” said Kendall. She shrugged her shoulders and said, with that calm resignation which is so much to be met with, “_C’est la guerre...._ It is the war.” That is a phrase which explains everything, excuses anything in France to-day. “_C’est la guerre._” One offers it to explain the lateness of trains, the price of cheese, poverty, the lack of sugar, morale, everything great or small. “_C’est la guerre_” is the countersign of the epoch. It embraces everything. After an hour she arose, offered her hand charmingly, and said good night and “_Merci_.” Kendall sat looking after her, feeling the first life movements of a comprehension of the womankind of France. From that moment they assumed a higher place in his thoughts, not yet so high as they deserved, but one rung nearer to the truth. He did not even begin to understand them—not their philosophy of life nor their conception of the relations between the sexes; but he began to ask himself questions to which his education and prejudices and narrownesses could provide no answer. He began to wonder if all he had heard were true; he began to consider, if it were true, was it then necessarily evil. He had been brought up to regard the drinking of any beverage containing alcohol as inherently wicked and as something to be done surreptitiously and with a sort of “devilish” feeling. Here everybody drank wine, and wine contained alcohol, and they did it with no concealment and with no thought that it could be other than normal and perfectly respectable. He considered that, and from it attempted to form a judgment of other things which to him seemed not as they should be. Apparently drinking in France was not a thing of moral turpitude, done as it was done by the French.... Perhaps, then, other matters were the same: evil in Detroit because custom and inherited moral conceptions had made them so; right in Paris because custom and inherited moral conceptions had made them so.... Dimly he was feeling for the conception that an act in itself is not a sin, but the manner of the performance of that act.... This may