win.  Reluctantly we turned our faces from Italy to France.  Yet the journey had been well worth while.  We came home with a definite and hopeful impression about Italy.  The Turin riot, bad as it was, was not an anti-war riot.  It was directed at the bad administration of the food controller.  Italy then was not an invaded country, as France was, and had no such enthusiasm for the war, as a nation has when its soil is invaded.  Italy has that enthusiasm now for the war.  We saw that her man-power was hardly tapped.  She has millions to pour into the trenches.  She needs and will need until the end of the war, iron and coal.  She will have to borrow her guns and her fuel.  But she has almost enough food.  We found sugar scarce; butter scarce, and bread sharply allowanced in hotels and restaurants.  We found two meatless days a week besides Friday and found the people, as a rule, observing them.  We found the industries of the nation turned solely toward the war.  Italy realizes what defeat means.  The pro-Austrian party which was strong at the beginning of the war has vanished, and since the invasion, even the Pope has lost his interest in peace!

But all these things are temporary; with the war’s passing they will pass.  The real thing we found was an awakening people, coming into the new century eager and wise and sure that it held somewhere in its coming years the dawn of a new day.  That really is the hope of the war—­an industrial hope, not a political hope, not a geographical hope, but a hope for better things for the common man.  It is a hope that Christianity may take Christendom, and that the fellowship among the nations of the world so devoutly hoped for, may be possible because of a fellowship among men inside of nations.

CHAPTER VII

WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN PROPOSITION

It is curious how the human heart throws out homeseeking tendrils.  As we crossed the Italian frontier and came back into France, keen longing for the Ritz—­even the Ritz with its gloomy grandeur came to me, and Henry confessed that he was glad to get back to a country where a man could get a good refreshing bowl of onion soup!  After dinner, our first evening at the Ritz, we were looking over the theatrical offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator at the hotel, when whom should we meet but “Auntie,” the patrician relative of the Gilded Youth.  She recognized us in our civilian clothes, and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of complicating our formal greetings with gaiety.  Auntie’s troubled face would have caught Henry’s quick sensitive eyes.  But Auntie’s voice brushed aside the levity of the opening.