memories, bound up with the sight of all those evil engines.  But personal sorrow is the sentiment least visible in the look of Paris.  It is not fanciful to say that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired a new character.  The change seems to have affected the very stuff it is moulded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human clay into some dense commemorative substance.  I often pass in the street women whose faces look like memorial medals—­idealized images of what they were in the flesh.  And the masks of some of the men—­those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and a little satyr-like—­look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt and twisted from their baptism of fire.  But none of these faces reveals a personal preoccupation:  they are looking, one and all, at France erect on her borders.  Even the women who are comparing different widths of Valenciennes at the lace-counter all have something of that vision in their eyes—­or else one does not see the ones who haven’t.

It is still true of Paris that she has not the air of a capital in arms.  There are as few troops to be seen as ever, and but for the coming and going of the orderlies attached to the War Office and the Military Government, and the sprinkling of uniforms about the doors of barracks, there would be no sign of war in the streets—­no sign, that is, except the presence of the wounded.  It is only lately that they have begun to appear, for in the early months of the war they were not sent to Paris, and the splendidly appointed hospitals of the capital stood almost empty, while others, all over the country, were overcrowded.  The motives for the disposal of the wounded have been much speculated upon and variously explained:  one of its results may have been the maintaining in Paris of the extraordinary moral health which has given its tone to the whole country, and which is now sound and strong enough to face the sight of any misery.

And miseries enough it has to face.  Day by day the limping figures grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more frequent in passing carriages.  In the stalls at the theatres and concerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have to wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting arm.  Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very essence of what I have called the look of Paris.  They are grave, these young faces:  one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the trenches, but the wounded are not gay.  Neither are they sad, however.  They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured.  It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness, meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of the look on their faces.