"One of the new arrivals had hands stiffened from recently healed wounds. She brought his plate of baked beans, roast meat, potatoes, a bowl of coffee, and pudding. A young Canadian with flaming, rosy cheeks divided the last doughnut with his friend, the Anzac. Crullers are the greatest influence in canteen for the general friendliness among soldiers of different armies. A League of Nations could be founded upon them if negotiations were left to the privates about the oilcloth-covered tables. "The boy with the crippled hands protested that he did not want to accept a dinner for which there was so little charge. "'Say, Miss,' he said, 'I can pay more. I don't have to be sponging.' "'You have folks in the states?' she asked. He had. "'Then,' she explained, 'they are the ones who support the American Red Cross. When you come here it is because the folks asked you in to dinner.' "'But I haven't any folks,' announced a sailor. "'I'm from the States, so I am your folks,' she retorted, 'and the Red Cross is your folks. We invite you to three meals a day as long as you stay in Paris.' "'You are my folks,' said the boy who was only a youngster, 'and you sure look like home to me.' "The soldier with the crippled hands wanted to describe his wounds. Like hundreds of others he began with the sensations in the field, 'when he got his.' Deftly as she had learned to do during hundreds of such recitals, she cleaned up the table and stacked the plates without seeming to interrupt. It was three o'clock, the end of her day. She had reported at seven in the morning. The following week she would report with the other members of the staff at eleven at night because the doors of a canteen must never be closed. "The boy talked on. He was explaining homesickness, the sort which drives men from cafés where the food is unfamiliar and the names on the menus cannot be translated into 'doughboy French' to such places as the little room in the Gare St. Lazare. "She discovered that her habitual posture was with arms akimbo and hands spread out over her hips. This position seemed to rest the ache in her shoulders. Through her memory flashed pictures of waitresses in station eating houses who stood that way while tourists fought for twenty minutes' worth of ham and eggs between trains. "Red Cross after-war canteens were a social center for pretty idlers in smart blue smocks? "The smile on her lips never faltered and the hidden smile in her heart became a little song of laughter. "She was 'helping'--helping in an 'eating joint,' some of the boys called it. But it was an eating joint with a soul." What more could one ask of an eating-house?