But she did now! It had reached her very self, at last, the knowledge that he had been there, that he had been of good cheer, that he loved her, that he thought the war might yet be won for the right, that he had even laughed, had said—what was that quaint phrase?—“The Yanks are coming!”
She took the watch up in her hands, laid it against her cheek, and began to cry, sweet, weak, child-like tears.
She groped her way back to the bed, weeping silently, the watch clutched tightly in her hand.
She lay down beside the unloved little orphan, whom she loved through pity; she took him in her arms; she felt the watch cold and hard and actual against her heart, and, the tears still on her cheeks, she fell once more asleep, smiling.
FRANCE’S FIGHTING WOMAN DOCTOR
The American public has just heard of Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, the woman doctor who was mobilized and sent to the front by mistake, and who proved herself so fearless and useful that she was kept there for two years amid bursting shells and rattling mitrailleuses. She is being cited spectacularly as a dramatic proof that women can take men’s parts, and do men’s work, and know the man’s joy of being useful. But she is much more than a woman doing a man’s work. She is a human being of the highest type, giving to her country the highest sort of service, and remaining normal, sane, and well-balanced.
Long before the tornado of the war burst over the world, Paris knew her in many varying phases which now, as we look back, we see to have been the unconscious preparation for the hour of crisis. Personally I knew of her, casually, as the public-spirited young doctor who was attached to the Paris lycée where my children go to school, and who was pushing the “fresh-air” movement for the city poor. People who met her in a social way knew her as an attractive woman with a well-proportioned figure, lovely hair, and clear brown eyes, whom one met once or twice a week at the theater or in the homes of mutual friends, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh and cheerful, chatting talk. Other people who saw her every morning in her laboratory garb, serious, intent, concentrated, knew her as one of those scientific investigators who can not rest while the horrible riddle of cancer is unsolved.
Those who saw her in the afternoon among the swarming sick and poor of the clinique of the great Beaujon Hospital, knew her as one of those lovers of their kind who can not rest as long as the horrible apathy of public opinion about tuberculosis continues. People who investigated cures for city ills and who went to visit the model tenement house for the very poor, near the St. Ouen gate of Paris, knew her as the originator and planner of that admirable enterprise, whose energy and forcefulness saw it financed and brought to practical existence. Observers who knew her in the big international Feminist Conferences in European capitals, saw an alert, upright, quick-eyed Parisienne, whose pretty hats showed no sign of the erudition of the head under them. Friends knew her as the gently bred woman who, although driven by no material necessity, renounced the easy, sheltered, comfortable life of the home-keeping woman for an incessant, beneficent activity, the well-ordered regularity of which alone kept it from breaking down her none too robust health. And those intimates who saw her in her home, saw her the most loved of sisters and daughters, the most devoted of mothers, adored by the little son to whom she has been father and mother ever since he was four years old.