“Will you serve me and fight for me against all my enemies?” she asked. “But quite seriously,” she added, “give it a little more thought—the enlisting, I mean. The world isn’t too rich in kind influences. It needs men like you. Come, pull yourself together and show a little pluck.” She laughed.!

“You feel you must beat that drum,” he suggested. “Beat it louder and louder and louder till all the world shall hear it.” “What’s he like in himself?” he asked her. “You’ve been seeing something of him, haven’t you?”

“But perhaps I can arrange a meeting for you with a friend,” she added, “who will be better able to help you, if he is in Paris. I will let you know.” One of the women on her list, and the one to whom Mrs. Denton appeared to attach chief importance, a Madame de Barante, disappointed Joan. She seemed to have so few opinions of her own. She had buried her young husband during the Franco-Prussian war. He had been a soldier. And she had remained unmarried. She was still beautiful. “God knows I didn’t want it, speaking personally,” said a German prisoner one day, with a laugh. “I had been working at a printing business sixteen hours a day for seven years. It was just beginning to pay me, and now my wife writes me that she has had to shut the place up and sell the machinery to keep them all from starving.”