In solitude she ate her well-cooked meals. By the stone fireside (in other years the center of family life and gaiety) she sat in the evenings reading her Figaro, with her knitting in the recesses of the Louis XVI "tricoteuse" close at hand in case the print became blurred, which so often happened of late. Meditating, her pure thoughts far from the world and its stormy passions, her judgment became, perhaps, too severe; her charity a trifle too customary and censorious. All her actions were the result of axioms and precepts laid down years ago by long-dead parents. To her the past shone with a glorious light of Humanity and Youth, full of kindly people and cheerful pleasures and gay days. The present, so solitary and sad, had crept upon her unperceived, to find her with wrinkling brow and graying hair, more and more lonely. Every morning at early mass she looked with noncomprehension into the faces of the elderly women—her comtemporaries—mothers these many years. Long ago they loved and married, leaving "la Mademoiselle" to her patrician seclusion up at the "great house." Lusty youths and strong, fresh-faced girls clustered about these contemporaries; sweet-faced young women, holding babies against their rounded breasts; boys touched their caps in awe as she left the church; girls smiled, blushing and demure; children sucked their thumbs and bobbed courtesies; but to none was she vital or important. To them the world was full of busy pleasures and activities, of warm summer days and young joys; to her, bending over her endless tapestry-work in the silence of the old manor, the world seemed trite indeed. Her home was so orderly, so clean, so proper, so remote from life. No muddy footprints on the wax floors, no child's toys forgotten in the corner, no cap or jacket thrown carelessly on disturbed furniture. Her apartments were sweet with lavender and roses, but tobacco smoke was a stranger to their antique propriety. Now, suddenly, all these quiet ways, these time-honored habits were destroyed. War broke over France and she, with countless of her countrywomen, donned the white linen gown embroidered with that cross-of-red emblem of so many sacrifices and devotions. The hastily-installed hospital became her only thought; all her energy, care, and patience must be brought to the aid of the broken men as her tribute to the defenders of France.