There were women in uniform on our ship whose mouths were tightly shut in the grim determination of service--one could fairly see "Z-E-A-L" written in unmistakable letters upon their high foreheads--and there were girls who fretted about the appearance of the curls under the edges of their small service caps and who coquetted with the young British aviators returning home after service as instructors on the flying fields here in the United States. Between these extremes there was vast range and variety. But the marvelous part of it all was that all of them--each after her own creed or fashion, for the dominating quality of our individualism multiplies geometrically in the case of our American womanhood--ranged true to any test that might be put upon them. The storm showed that. I did not have the personal opportunity of seeing the Red Cross girls in battle service; but I did see them in the canteens in the hard, hard months that followed the signing of the armistice, saw them in the wards and the recreation huts of hospital after hospital, saw them, too, in Paris headquarters, working under very difficult conditions of light and ventilation--living of every sort--and at manual or office work or humdrum dreariness. The girl in uniform who sat all day in a poorly lighted and aired room at a typewriter or a filing case had a far less dramatic or poetic job than the traditional Red Cross girl who stands at a battlefield canteen or in a hospital ward holding the hand of some good-looking--and perhaps marriageable--young captain or colonel. Yet her service was as real as uncomplaining and--for the reasons we have just seen--vastly more difficult.