The painted lady was looking at her with smiling eyes, but back of the eyes she seemed to discern a wistful appeal--"I want you to stay. No matter what happens I beg that you will stay." But Jean didn't want to stay. All the youth in her rebelled against the thing that she saw ahead of her. She yearned to be free--to live and love as she pleased, not a prisoner in that shadowed room. So she pushed it away from her, and so there came one morning a letter from her father. "Drusilla went over on the same boat. It was a surprising thing to find her there. Since I landed, I haven't seen her. But I met Captain Hewes in Paris, and he was looking for her. "I had never known how fine she was until those days on the boat. It was wonderful on the nights when everything was darkened and we were feeling our way through the danger zone, to have her sing for us. I believe we should all have gone to the bottom singing with her if a submarine had sunk us. "I am finding myself busier than I have ever been before, finding myself, indeed, facing the most stupendous thing in the world. It isn't the wounded men or the dead men or the heart-breaking aspect of the refugees that gets me, it is the sight of the devastated country--made barren and blackened into hell not by devils, but by those who have called themselves men. When I think of our own country, ready soon to bud and bloom with the spring, and of this country where spring will come and go, oh, many springs, before there will be bud and bloom, I am overwhelmed by the tragic contrast. How can we laugh over there when they are crying here? Perhaps more than anything else, the difference in conditions was brought home to me as I motored the other day through a country where there was absolutely no sign of life, not a tree or a bird--except those war birds, the aeroplanes, hovering above the horizon. "Well, as we stopped our car for some slight repairs, there rose up from a deserted trench, a lean cat with a kitten in her mouth. Oh, such a starved old cat, Jean, gray and war-worn. And her kitten was little and blind, and when she had laid it at our feet, she went back and got another. Then she stood over them, mewing, her eyes big and hungry. But she was not afraid of us, or if she was afraid, she stood her ground, asking help for those helpless babies. "Jean, I thought of Polly Ann. Of all the petted Polly Anns in America, and then of this starved old thing, and they seemed so typical. You are playing the glad game over there, and it is easy to play it with enough to eat and plenty to wear, and away from the horror of it all. But how could that old pussy-cat be glad, how could she be anything but frightened and hungry and begging my help?