man, and a visé in purple ink lets me through to the boat.
Shall I remember the Sussex? You don't so much after you've lived daily with death for a while. Some time during the night I am drowsily conscious that the boat begins to move. A skilled pilot has taken the wheel to guide us in and out among mines placed perilously as a protection against German submarines. Our lives are coming through dangerous narrows. In the morning we are safe in Havre. The next steel line, here, is French. And with the letter from the consul at New York in my hand I am literally and cordially and politely bowed into France.
At my hotel in the Rue de Rivoli, the American man opposite me at the dinner table the next day is just about to sail, "going back to God's country, as far away home as I can get, to the tall pine trees on the Pacific Coast," he tells me. He had come to Europe on an assignment that was to have been accomplished in three months. It has taken him a year to get to the front. My knife and fork drop in despair on my plate as he says it. "Cheer up," he urges. "You just have to remember to take a Frenchman's promises as lightly as they're made. They always aim to please. And your hopes rise so that you order two cocktails for dinner to-night. Then to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow there will be only more promises. But you're an American woman. You'll dig through. Good luck," he says. And a taxicab takes him.
