And he does it. You don’t have to call his secretary a week later to ask, How about that letter the embassy was going to give me? And the week after and the week after ring up some more to recall that there’s an American running up an expense account at the hotel down the street. That’s not Mr. Sharpe’s way. Within ten minutes he had handed me a letter of introduction to M. Briand, Prime Minister of France. He laughed as he passed it to me. “Honestly, I’d hate to hand any one a gold brick,” he said. “That document looks imposing enough and important enough that a limousine should be at your hotel entrance to take you to the front at 9 A. M. to-morrow. But nothing like that will happen. In France you have to remember that no one hurries. And an American can’t.” You can hear that in every foreign language. It was a spectacled Herr Professor in Berlin who once said to me severely, “You Americans, this hurry it is your national vice.” I feel that foreign governments have duly disciplined me in this direction during the past few months. So much of my job in serving the _Pictorial Review_ in Europe seems to be to sit on a chair and wait in a War Office ante room. At the Maison de la Presse, 3 Rue François 1st, in the Service de l’Information Diplomatique, whither my Briand letter leads me, I seem to spend hours. They are going to be charmed, as Frenchmen can be, to take me to the front. And the days pass and the days pass. “Ah, but you see, for a lady journalist it is so different and so difficult. The trip must be specially arranged.” And the weeks go by. And M. Polignac is so polite and polite and polite—just that and nothing more. One day he says to me: “And, Mme. Daggett, how long is it you will be in Paris?” “Why,” I falter, “I hadn’t expected to winter here. I’m waiting, you know, just waiting until I can go to the front.” “And how much longer now could you wait?” he inquires. “Oh,” I answer desperately, “I’ll surely have to go by the 29th. I couldn’t stay longer than that.” So in the course of the next few days there comes a letter telling me how it pains the French government that they should not be able to “take that trip in hand” before the 29th. And of course if I must leave them on that date, as I had said I must, oh, they so much regret, etc., etc. If I intend to get to the front, evidently then I must dig through! And in my room at the Hotel Regina in the Rue de Rivoli, I take my pen in hand.