"Archie," she said, trembling in every limb, "I shall leave your house to-morrow." "Good!" he cried. "Good! And I'm going to beat you to it!" He strode to the kitchen door and flung it wide. "Come here, Ellen Neal, and bear witness that I'm leaving this house first." The front door banged behind him.... The two women stared at each other. "Was that--was that _Mr. Archie_?" "Yes," said Joan, still trembling, "it was!--Come upstairs and help me pack my trunk." CHAPTER LIV There is little to be said here about Joan's experiences in France. The story of those is better told in her own remarkable letters, which began shortly to appear in certain magazines; and in the book that followed. Stefan Nikolai had found her shelter with a friend of his, Lady Arbuthnot, a clever old Englishwoman whose long horse-face and charming voice and odd combinations of tweed skirt and evening blouses were known and loved in every institution of mercy about Paris. Under Lady Arbuthnot's guidance Joan found use for not only her Red Cross training but for everything else she had, whether by gift or acquirement. Singing, story-telling, "play-acting," letter-writing, even dancing, all seemed as important a part of her equipment as the regulation sewing, bandage-making, and cookery. She tried an inexperienced hand at washing dishes and scrubbing floors. She also tried her hand at mending shattered nerves and even broken hearts; and at none of these things was she entirely unsuccessful. There was a certain power of concentration in Joan that made failure unlikely in whatever she undertook. It was a wonderful time to her. She never got nearer the trenches than Paris; but there the trenches came to her, with all their horror, their sordid hideousness, their sheer, soul-stirring grandeur. She saw shattered men struggling back to life that they might offer it again, with eagerness; she saw philanthropists living in comfort on money that had been obtained to feed starving refugees; she saw girl-children, who had been forced to bear German babies, loving those babies with a passion of maternity piteously beyond their years. Priests labored side by side with panders; women of the great world, such as Lady Arbuthnot, shared bed and board and ceaseless effort with W. C. T. U. workers from Kansas, with missionaries out of China, with ex-courtesans from the Paris streets, with those most sheltered of all aristocrats, the women of the upper French bourgeoisie. It was humanity with all barriers down, all contacts clean and clear. And Louisville, Kentucky, seemed as far away and negligible as the planet Earth may seem to possible dwellers on the moon.