"I will try it," said the pianist. "It amuses me to improvise. If it would not worry you--" It was not wearisome. He played with a master-touch, and the room was filled with rushing notes and crashing harmonies. For a little time I could not guess the meaning of their theme. Then suddenly I was aware of it. It was the tramp of arms, the roar of battle, the song of victory and of death. Wailing voices came across fields of darkness, and then, with the dawn, birds sang, while the dead lay still. The musician gave a queer laugh. "Any good?" "C'est la guerre!" said a girl by my side. She shivered a little. They were Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes in that room, with a few Parisians among them. Students to whom all life is expressed in music, they went on with their work in spite of the war. But war had touched their spirit too, with its great tragedy, and found expression in their art. It was but one glimpse behind the scenes of Paris, in time of war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and scraping of palettes and adventures among books. Even the artists' clubs had not all closed their doors, though so many young painters were mixing blood with mud and watching impressionistic pictures of ruined villages through the smoke of shells. Through cigarette smoke I gazed at the oddest crowd in one of these clubs off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Slavs with matted hair, American girls in Futurist frocks, Italians like figures out of pre- Raphaelite frescoes, men with monkey faces and monkey manners, men with the faces of mediaeval saints a little debauched by devilish temptations, filled the long bare room, spoke in strange tongues to each other, and made love passionately in the universal language and in dark corners provided with ragged divans. A dwarf creature perched on a piano stool teased the keys of an untuned piano and drew forth adorable melody, skipping the broken notes with great agility. ... It was the same old Paris, even in time of war. 14