While I was waiting for the train at Esbly I had a conversation with a woman who chanced to sit beside me on a bench on the quai, which seemed to me significant.

Today everyone talks to everyone.  All the barriers seem to be down.  We were both reading the morning paper, and so, naturally, got to talking.  I happened to have an English paper, in which there was a brief account of the wonderful dash made by the Royal Scots at Petit Bois and the Gordon Highlanders at Maeselsyeed Spur, under cover of the French and British artillery, early in the month, and I translated it for her.  It is a moral duty to let the French people get a glimpse of the wonderful fighting quality of the boys under the Union Jack.

In the course of the conversation she said, what was self-evident, “You are not French?” I told her that I was an American.  Then she asked me if I had any children, and received a negative reply.

She sighed, and volunteered that she was a widow with an only son who was “out there,” and added:  “We are all of us French women of a certain class so stupid when we are young.  I adore children.  But I thought I could only afford to have one, as I wanted to do so much for him.  Now if I lose that one, what have I to live for?  I am not the sort of woman who can marry again.  My boy is a brave boy.  If he dies he will die like a brave man, and not begrudge the life he gives for his country.  I am a French mother and must offer him as becomes his mother.  But it was silly of me to have but this one.  I know, now that it is too late, that I could have done as well, and it may be better, with several, for I have seen the possibilities demonstrated among my friends who have three or four.”

Of course I did not say that the more she had, the more she might have had to lose, because I thought that if, in the face of a disaster like this, French women were thinking such thoughts—­and if one does, hundreds may—­it might be significant.

I had a proof of this while in Paris.  I went to a house where I have been a visitor for years to get some news of a friend who had an apartment there.  I opened the door to the concierge’s loge to put my question.  I stopped short.  In the window, at the back of the half dark room, sat the concierge, whom I had known for nearly twenty years, a brave, intelligent, fragile woman.  She was sitting there in her black frock, gently rocking herself backward and forward in her chair.  I did not need to put a question.  One knows in these days what the unaccustomed black dress means, and I knew that the one son I had seen grow from childhood, for whom she and the father had sacrificed everything that he might be educated, for whom they had pinched and saved—­was gone.

I said the few words one can say—­I could not have told five minutes later what they were—­and her only reply was like the speech of the woman of another class that I had met at Esbly.

“I had but the one.  That was my folly.  Now I have nothing—­and I have a long time to live alone.”