Then, one after another, the drivers entered ... pulling off their great gloves as they came, stamping the snow from their boots. They stood about, drinking from their steaming bowls, bright-eyed, apparently untired, throwing little quick scraps of talk to each other--about the slowness of "St. John's" on this particular night, who hadn't their cases ready and kept one or two ambulances "simply ages"; or the engine trouble developed by one car which still kept it out somewhere on the road. And I stood and listened and watched them, and I received an impression of extraordinary beauty. These girls, with their leather caps coming down to their brows and over their ears, looked like splendid young airmen, their clear, bold faces coming out from between the leather flaps. They were not pretty, they were touched with something finer, some quality of radiance only increased by their utter unconsciousness of it. Each girl, with her clear face, her round, close head, her stamping feet and strong, cold hands, seemed so intensely alive within the dark globe of the night, that her life was heightened to a point not earthly, as though she were a visitant from the snows or fields I had not seen, fields Olympian.... And as each came swinging in--"_vera incessu patuit dea_...." I could have wished them there for ever, like some sculptured frieze, so lovely was the rightness and the inspiration of it. But I went to my bed, and one of the goddesses insisted on refilling my hot-water bag, though I assured her it would be quite well as it was, and I was unwound from my swaddling clothes and left to dream. CHAPTER XI "AND THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER" Since the beginning of things women have been mixed up in war, and it is only as the world has become more civilised (if in view of the present one can make that assertion) that their place in it has been questioned. The whole question of the civilian population has taken on a different aspect since the outbreak of this war, owing to the extraordinary and unprecedented penalties attached to the civilian status by Germany, but the sub-division labelled "Women" has perhaps undergone more revision than any. It has undergone so much revision, in fact, that women have, in large masses, ceased to be civilians and are ranked as the Army. If it be frankly conceded that it is as natural for women to want to get to the war as men, one clears the way for profitable discussion without wasting time while the outworn epithets of "unwomanly" and "sensation-hunters" are flung through the air to the great obscuring thereof. The delight in danger for its own sake is common to all human beings, to the young as an intoxicant, to the old as a drug. It is not the least of the tragedies of woman that this is a delight in which she is so seldom able to indulge.