In the upper left hand corner is attached my photograph. The Department of State at Washington requires it for all travellers now before they affix the great red seal that gives authenticity to the personal information recorded in this paper. From the passport photograph to my face, the officer glances sharply, suspiciously, like a bank teller looking for a forgery. I feel him looking straight through me to the very curl at the back of my neck. Ah, apparently it is I! “Now what have you come over here for?” he inquires in a tone of voice that seems to say, “Nobody asked you to England. We’re quite too busy about other things to entertain strangers.” I hand him my official journalistic letter addressed “To Whom it may Concern.” Signed by the editor of the _Pictorial Review_, it states that I am delegated to study the new position of women due to the war. Will he want me to? He may be as sensitive as the British consul in New York about the woman movement. He may prefer that it should not move at all. I hold my breath while he reads the letter. Then I have to talk. I tell him, I think, the complete story of my life. I show him all of my credentials. I give him my photograph. You always have to do that. Photographs that are duplicates of the one on your passport, you must carry by the dozen. You have to leave them like visiting cards with gentlemen in khaki all over Europe. Well, what is he going to do about me? I get out my letters of social introduction. There are 84! I strew them on the table for him to read. There is a door just behind his head. Will it be in there, the search and the confiscation and the lemon acid bath? I wonder, and I wonder. But I try to stand very still. If I move one foot, it might jar the decision that is forming in the officer’s mind. I am watching alertly for his expression. But there isn’t any. I can’t tell at all whether he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind that I am a spy. He has read only four letters—— And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: “She’s all right. Let her go.” I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to “Our Duchess” has done it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes all opposition!