None of the women's work over there was easy--the romantic girl who went to France lured on by the dream pictures of some artist-illustrator as to the dramatic phases of canteen or hospital work was quickly disillusionized. The real thing was vastly different from the picture. A dirty and unshaven doughboy in bed or standing in a long queue waiting for his cigarettes or chocolate, and speaking Polish or Yiddish when he came to them, was a far, far different creature from the young wounded officer of the picture who must have been an F. F. V. or at least from one of the first families of Baltimore or Philadelphia. And the hours! They were fearfully hard--to put it lightly. Eight, ten, or twelve hours at a stretch was a pretty good and exhausting test of a girl's vitality. Nor was this all of the job, either. Many and many a woman worker of the Red Cross or, for that matter, the Y. M. C. A., too, has stood eight or ten or twelve hours on her feet in a canteen and then has ridden twenty or thirty miles in a truck or camionette to an army dance, has danced three or four or five more hours with soldier boys who, even if they do not happen to be born dancers, do covet the attention and interest of decent girls, and has returned to only a few hours of sleep, before the long turn in the canteen once again. And has repeated this performance four or five times a week. For what? Because she was crazy for dancing? Not a bit of it. For of a truth they became sick of dancing--"fed up" is the phrase they frequently used when they spoke of it at all. "I feel as if I never wanted to hear an orchestra again," one of them told me one day as I stopped at her canteen--in a French town close to the occupied territory. "But I have four dates already for next week and three for the week after. Another month of this sort of thing and I shall be a fit candidate for a rolling chair." "Why do you do it?" I ventured. "Why do I do it?" she repeated. "The boys need us. Have you noticed the kind of girls that drift up here from Paris? If you have, you will understand why my job is unending, why it only pauses for a very little while indeed at night, when I jump into my bed for six or seven hours of well-earned sleep."