At the beginning of the second winter, in November, 1915, I sent my three children to live for a few weeks in my studio, which I had fixed up especially for them. They had a piano and a phonograph and books and toys. They moved over with their nurse on a Sunday afternoon, and thought it was a great lark. The next day their father went to see them and told them about the arrival of a baby sister.

Tuesday morning the children came to see us. Never shall I forget their joy. Christine said immediately, "Hello, Hope, let me fix your feet. Mama, could I tuck her blanket in? Hope's feet are cold. I want to hold her soon." A little mother, she is. Lloyd, sensitive and reserved, stood quietly looking. He patted my face and tried to speak. But his mouth was turning down at the corners for just a second, and I had to save the day by asking him a cheerful question. Mimi clapped her hands and danced and said, "I like you, mama, dat's a fine baby." When Herbert went over to the consulate to register the baby, he took Christine with him. She heard him say to the Consul-General, Mr. Thackara, that his French friends were teasing him about the large number of marriage dots he will have to provide. Christine saw in this a reflection on girl babies. With a volley of French reproof, which delighted the whole consular office, she went for him tooth and nail.

Isn't it a joke on me to have so many daughters? I have always thought myself a good pal, understanding men much better than women. Miss Mary Cassatt came in. Her comment was subtle. She said simply to Herbert that she was glad of his assured increase of interest in women's suffrage. Surprised, Herbert was betrayed into asking why. "Don't you realize," exclaimed Miss Cassatt, "that you must begin now to interest yourself in the future of your girls?" Although the coming of Hope increases the problems of feminine psychology I shall have to deal with later on, I am glad the war baby was a girl. My first thought, when they told me, was that she should not have to carry a gun.

This brings me to her name. 1915 was drawing to a close with so many darkening shadows—but shadows that did not lessen our faith in the outcome of the war—that I thought the name imposed upon us by circumstances. I called her Hope Delarue. Dear old Père Delarue is one of the best known research scholars in the Jesuit Order. Our friendship, founded back in Constantinople days, has deepened during the war. When Herbert went off on his many trips, anyone of which might have proved the last, he left me in the care of Père Delarue. The dear old man had been coming to us from time to time with the news of another loss in his family. His brother, a general in the French army, was killed. His nephews had fallen. I thought it would comfort him to feel that there was a child in the world to bear his name. Before going to Suez, Herbert gave me some flat silver marked H.D.G. It flashed into his brain the day after the baby was born that the little thing had its mother's initials!

I was up for the first time on Christmas Eve. We had a large party as usual, with a tree for the children trimmed by the grown-ups. In spite of the rain we tried to make our Christmas Day a joyful one. There was the newborn baby to celebrate. At the end of the afternoon, Herbert gave us a hurried kiss all around, and went out in the rain to catch the train for Marseilles. He sailed the next day on the André Lebon for Port-Said. His was the only one of the three passenger boats that week to escape the submarines. The P. and O. Persia was sunk off Crete and the Japanese mail went down seventy miles from the Canal.

I did not see my husband for several months, and then he joined us in Nice for a few days before going to Verdun. It was a joyful reunion. Herbert admired his children and asked what they had done during his absence. But he forgot all about poor little Hope, who was taking her nap. Two hours after his arrival, a lusty cry brought back to his mind the fact that the number of his children was four.

Memories of these days are not painful, because we did not allow ourselves to be dominated by pain while they were being lived. The whirlwind was not of our making, nor had we gone deliberately into the midst of it. But, finding ourselves there, we made the best of it. Memories are precious. I would not have missed the Paris vistas of those years. It is a blessed thing to have in one's mind the long lines of adverse circumstances and difficulties and anxieties on either side if at the end is hope realized. And I have my own tangible Hope, a child whose merry, sunny nature is living proof of how Paris was at home in the whirlwind.

CHAPTER XXIII
SAUVONS LES BÉBÉS

"M-M-M-MADAME m-m-must not be f-f-frightened; he said so!"

My Bretonne cook came to me pale and stammering.