“Fine feathers don’t make fine birds,” I remind severely. “Bill, be warned!” “Yes, but there’s Gaby,” Bill suggests. “What about her?” Now Gaby is the little chauffeuse who has been driver for a French general three years and who turns up periodically in town. She is quaint as a wood-cut and solemn as an owl, with her shock of bobbed hair and her great staring child-like eyes. She sits at the mess table and never says a word but draws your glance irresistibly. Always she wears an odd little straight-cut dress hanging just below her knees and a _croix de guerre_ pinned to her breast. Gaby killed a man with her car not long since and was held a prisoner at Ligny-en-Barrois for ten days in consequence. Gaby and one of the sergeants at the A. R. are undergoing all the woe and wonder of love’s young dream. “Oh well,” I say, “Gaby is different.” This afternoon Rebecca appeared at the canteen and asked for Bill. She was so elegantly attired that at first I didn’t know her. After a parley at the door, Bill, with an odd expression on his face, takes his second-best raincoat from the peg and hands it to her. I looked my inquiries. An old doughboy sweetheart of the lady’s, it appears, had returned on leave and they were going travelling together. “Going off on a honey-moon with another feller, in my raincoat! Gosh, it’s a cruel war!” grinned Bill. Mauvages, November 24. Now that the time is drawing on toward Christmas the boys,—bless them!—are all wanting to send some remembrance to mothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts at home. But what to send has been the desperate question. One sort of goods and one only is offered for such purposes by the French stores in this locality, a line of flimsy silk stuff, handkerchiefs, scarfs and little aprons, machine-embroidered with gay flowers and each bearing the legend “Souvenir de France.” They are fragile slazy things, absurdly high-priced, inappropriate and often hideous. But to the boys they are altogether beautiful. After many requests and inquiries I gave in. I went to Gondrecourt and purchased what I could find that was the least tawdry, the least exorbitant. I brought them to the canteen; they proved so popular that three days afterward I had to make another trip to town to buy some more. Now we carry a regular stock of fancy silk handkerchiefs and aprons in addition to the chewing tobacco and cigarettes. But here one is faced with a delicate problem. Each handkerchief is embroidered with some such specific legend as _To my Sweetheart_, _To My Dear Wife_, _To my Darling Daughter_,—I refused to consider the bit of lacy frippery marked _To my Dear Son!_—and this complicates matters immensely I find. Somehow we always manage to have a supply of Sweethearts on hand when a man is in quest of a Dear Wife and vice versa. In vain I artfully suggest that it would be a pretty compliment to call one’s wife “Dear Sweetheart,” to their minds there seems to be something essentially compromising in such a notion.