And he handed me my European commission. The next morning when I applied for my passport I began to be written down in the great books of judgment which the chancelleries of the nations keep to-day. Hear the leaves rustle as the pages chronicle my record in full. I must clear myself of the charge of even a German relative-in-law. I must be able to tell accurately, say, how many blocks intervene between the Baptist Church and the city hall in the town where I was born. They want to know the colour of my husband’s eyes. They will ask for all that is on my grandfather’s tombstone. They must have my genealogy through all my greatest ancestors. I have learned it that I may tell it glibly. For I shall scarcely be able to go round the block in Europe, you see, without meeting some military person who must know. Even in New York, every consul of the countries to which I wish to proceed, puts these inquiries before my passport gets his visé. It is the British consul who is holding his in abeyance. He fixes me with a look, and he charges: “You’re not a suffragist, are you? Well,” he goes on severely, “they don’t want any trouble over there. I don’t know what they’ll do about you over there.” And his voice rises with his disapproval: “I don’t at all know that I ought to let you go.” But finally he does. And he leans across his desk and passes me the pen with which to “sign on the dotted line.” It is the required documentary evidence. He feels reasonably sure now that the Kaiser and I wouldn’t speak if we passed by. And for the rest? Well, all governments demand to know very particularly who goes there when it happens to be a woman. You’re wishing trouble on yourself to be a suffragist almost as much as if you should elect to be a pacifist or an alien enemy. There is a prevailing opinion—which is a hang-over from say 1908 —that you may break something, if it is only a military rule. Why are you wandering about the world anyhow? You’ll take up a man’s place in the boat in a submarine incident. You’ll be so in the way in a bombardment. And you’ll eat as much sugar in a day as a soldier. So, do your dotted lines as you’re told. They dance before my eyes in a dotted itinerary. It stretches away and away into far distant lands, where death may be the passing event in any day’s work. I shall face eternity from, say, the time that I awake to step into the bath tub in the morning until, having finished the last one hundredth stroke with the brush at night, I lay my troubled head on the pillow to rest uneasily beneath a heavy magazine assignment. “There’s going to be some risk,” the editor of the _Pictorial Review_ said to me that day in his office, with just a note of hesitation in his voice. “I’ll take it,” I agreed.