"Is that so, sir," the cable was running through her hands as she spoke. Then she added as the elevator passed the second floor, "If we could only have that here, sir. If we only could, sir!" "Well, it will come. That's the next revolution you want to start when you women get the ballot. Abolish these class schools like Eton and Harrow and put the money into better board schools. All the kids in my town, and in my state, and in my whole section of the country go to the common schools. Children should start life as equals. There is no snobbery so cruel as the snobbery that marks off childhood into classes! When you women vote here, the first thing to do is to smash that nonsense. But in the meantime keep the kids in school." "We've talked that all over," she answered. "And we're certainly going to try. He'll have his pension, and I'll have this job and he'll learn a trade and I think we can manage, sir!" The "sir" came belated. "Go to it, sister, and luck to you," cried her passenger as he rose from his bench. The car was nearing the fourth floor. "We shall," she answered; "no fear of that." She stopped the car, and they smiled as friends as she let him out of the door. "Well--good morning," she said as he turned down the corridor. The "sir" had left entirely when they reached the fourth floor. And all the women of Europe, excepting perhaps those still behind the harem curtains in Turkey and Germany of whom we know nothing, are dropping the servile "sir" and are emerging into life at the fourth floor as human beings. It may be well to digress a moment in this narrative, from our purely martial adventure, that we may consider for a few pages the woman question as it is affected by the war. To me, if not to Henry, who is highly practical, it seemed that in France and Italy, but particularly in England, the new Heaven and the new earth that is forming during this war, has created a new woman. Indeed the European woman of the war is almost American in her liberty. "European women," said a former American grand dame of the old order, sipping tea with me at an embassy in the dim lit gorgeousness of a mediaeval room, "are of two kinds: Those who are being crucified by the war, and those who are abusing the new found liberties which war has brought them!" "Liberties?" asked her colloquitor; not Henry. He had no patience with these theoretical excursions into speculative realms. "Liberties rather than privileges?" "Yes, liberties. Privileges are temporary," purred the lady at the embassy. "They come and go, but the whole trouble with this new situation is that it is permanent. That also is part of the crucifixion of those who suffer under it. These women never again can return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positions from which the awful needs of this war have driven them. The cultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highest product of our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the American level."