A person to whom she was all that was friendly once said: "She's perfectly delightful, but I should hate to be with her if she didn't like me." "You wouldn't be," was the reply. "She would see to that." In some ways her tastes were simple. She had an intense love of nature and was keenly observant. There was a driving trip through Normandy and Brittany, when "Aunt Moll's" vivid enjoyment of all the passing sights and sounds made a deep impression on the little niece who was one of the party. She noted everythingtrees and birds and flowers, and the colors of sea and sky. She got up early in the morning and walked about village streets, coming back to breakfast full of her adventures and discoveries; for she loved, too, to watch the comings and goings of people in street or courtyard.

From time to time Mary King fancied that she cared enough for one or another of her suitors to marry him, only to discover that she did not love him as much as she had thought; and then, alarmed no doubt by a vision of future boredom, she made all haste to free herself from the engagement. It had begun to appear that she would never be able to bring herself to marry until, when she was in her thirties, she met M. Waddington. He was over fifty, the son of an Englishman who had been naturalized in France, and after having attained distinction as an archæologist, he was gaining distinction in public life. He became successively Minister of Public Instruction, Senator, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Plenipotentiary to the Congress of Berlin, Premier and Ambassador.

It was a happy marriage. We have all become familiar with the "W." of the letters. His wife called him Willy. She loved him devotedly to the end of his life and mourned him truly when he died. It is safe to say that she was not bored while he lived, for besides their affection and their congeniality, life with him offered her so much that was interesting and to her taste; always the top of everything; high society, high politics, a high diplomatic position. From her point of vantage she must have observed many vitally important things, but whatever state secrets she may have learned she never betrayed. In her letters she kept

safely on the surface of things, mentioning now and then that "W." didn't let her make her comments outside of his study. You saw the pomp and glitter of great spectacles; you saw also the human side of royalty; you came to recognize "W." and Francis, the little son, and "H.," the sister to whom most of the charming letters were written, but "W." was never to be embarrassed by any indiscreet revelation of serious affairs.

In these letters, side by side with the descriptions of the pageants in which she was both spectator and participant, there is always her interest in the varied aspect of the humbler human scene and her love of nature. Of Moscow she writes: "I am sorry now that I didn't write a regular journal. . . . But, unfortunately, my writing-table was on the court, and as soon as I established myself all sorts of interesting things immediately began to take place under the window."

And then she leaves her window to take her place as the wife of France's Ambassador Extraordinary to the Coronation of the Emperor Alexander III, which she describes for her family at home. A description with a thrill in it, when no one knew how soon a bomb might be thrown nor whom it might destroy. Madame l'Ambassadrice was nervous about going to that coronation, but she maligns herself when she says that she is "a perfect poltroon." Cowardice didn't run in her family and she was as brave and adventurous as the rest of them.

She always loved her windows and wrote picturesquely of the things which she saw from them. Her picture of the scene on which she looked down at Windsor Castle is charmingly done, as are also her descriptions of the life inside the castle. She had something more than a formal knowledge of it, for among the pleasant legacies of her ten years in England as ambassadress was the cordial and lasting friendliness of many members of the royal family. We get some interesting bits in her unpublished letters, nothing prettier than the scene when Queen Alexandra opened a wardrobe door and showed, hanging inside, the dress and little bonnet which Queen Victoria wore on her last jubilee. "Nobody else seemed to want these things," said the Queen,

"and I thought I would like to have them." Mr. Strachey tells us how King Edward feared his mother, but the daughter-in-law does not seem to have shared that feeling toward the woman who "was such a good mother and good friend to her from the first moment she arrived in England."

Madame Waddington was very loyal to those friends of hers in England; and she was equally loyal to every one who had once gained her regard or who had any claim of kinship. The old friends of her youth, when they came to Paris, her kindred to the remotest degree, even those whom she had never before seen, all were sure of the warmest of welcomes. For her immediate family her feeling was very strong, and she was also a woman of her word. After her mother's death she wrote to the sister-in-law who had always received a weekly letter from Mrs. King: "H. and I will see that you get your weekly letter, dear Jan. And, busy woman though she was, and much as she hated the labor of writing, her fortnightly letters never failed to arrive as long as Janet lived.

She liked young people and would do a great deal for them. When her midshipman great-nephew went over on his cruise and was in Paris for a week he took three of his friends to see his great-aunts, who made them all at home. The boys always said that those ladies saved their lives, for, owing to a mistake, the midshipmen had not got the promised railway rates from Villefranche, and the difference was great enough to make severe inroads on their pocket-money. Some months later the French Government, mindful of small courtesies even in the stress of war, refunded the extra railway fare, but for the moment they had not much more than enough money for lodgings and petit déjeuner. Madame Waddington helped them to find the lodgings and they dined with her and her sister every evening, and the menu was adjusted to the emergency.

This was in the summer of 1914, when she was seventy-five years old, but her nephew protests with energy against any suggestion that "Aunt Moll" was old, or even elderly. She went everywhere, did everything, was part of everything, was

always full of life and spirit. He told me how she went to the piano and, to her own accompaniment, sang a verse of the "Marseillaise" with much fire and in the strong voice of a young woman.

Before they left Paris the boys wanted to do something hospitable on their own side, so they invited the two ladies to tea. The four of them drove up in two taxicabs, took a lady in each cab, and drove to Armenonville. It was just when the rumor of mobilization was in the air and Madame Waddington wrote that this tea was a thrilling experience. "We were a decidedly conspicuous party," she added; "the two old ladies and the four young men in their white uniforms. People all about were looking and asking who they were-Russians perhaps. Russians wore white uniforms."

My own acquaintance with Madame Waddington, although of a good many years' standing, does not go back to her youth. When I knew her she didn't look young, she was a little stout, she was not handsome, she cared very little about clothes-in spite of the criticism, once heard, that her first books were "too full of chiffons." She always noticed dress as part of a scene, always tried to dress up to the part she had to play, and described her costumes minutely for "H.," who did care for those things. Undoubtedly, she had a certain amount of pleasure in her fine clothes, yet left to herself she was apt to be indifferent to her personal appearance, but you didn't pay much attention to it, because you were carried along by her charm. She was so buoyant, so interested in the world around her, so interesting in what she had to say about it. No, she didn't look young, but certainly I agree with her great-nephew that she was not old, or even elderly.

The unexpected adventure of authorship was a delightful climax to a life of so many interests and enjoyments. Madame Waddington was in her early sixties when a friend suggested the publication of the letters written from Russia and England. She had had no thought of the possibility of publishing her letters, written to her family and full of intimate details of personages whom we all like to hear about: emperors and empresses, kings and queens, diplomats and politi

cians; and written in a manner peculiarly fresh, unstudied, and vivid. She made no pretense to a literary style, said that she hadn't "a facile pen," that she made such a mess of it that she got ink all over her fingers and even in her hair; but through the point of that hated pen her narrative flowed out easily and picturesquely, the English plentifully interspersed with French, just as it came to her. One can see that she must have thought in a mixture of French and English.

She always wrote with a sort of careless ease, and perhaps because her first book was so unpremeditated and yet so strikingly successful, she seems never to have had that fear of "cold print" which often turns a light talker into a heavy writer. Yet when she was consciously writing for publication, Madame Waddington was anxious to do it well, and showed a modesty about her work and a desire to be instructed and criticised which were remarkable in a person who had already achieved such a success; a person, too, of great pride, who had always been sure of herself.

Her handwriting was extraordinarily difficult to read. For that reason the typewritten copy of her manuscript was always very incorrect as to proper names; and when it happened that she asked a friend in America to read her proof, the verification of the proper names was a wild adventure, especially when one was not allowed time to exchange letters with her. The proof of the "War Diary" had to be read over here because it was not feasible to send it back and forth in wartime, and promptness was desired. Never will the reader of that proof forget the effort to straighten out those names of many nationalities—the appeals sent out hastily to any one who might be likely to assist. For people do especially like to have their names spelled right. Still, it was a pleasure to read her proof, or to do anything else for her. Such was the spell which she cast.

During the war she worked as she had never dreamed of working. She was on any number of committees, spent chilly hours day after day in cold workrooms, raised all the money she could among her friends in America, threw herself into it body

herself as a Frenchwoman "devant la loi," was now in very truth a Frenchwoman. She brought to her tasks a cheerfulness which helped to warm any cold workroom which she entered, but physically she was worn away until she became shadowy in her thinness.

She had her personal anxieties and griefs. Her son was in the army. Her beloved sister and lifelong comrade, the "H." of the letters, died during one of those cold hard winters when it was impossible to get the warmth which might have prolonged life; and just when money was most needed, not only for her personal expenses but for France, her financial affairs became, for the time, seriously embarrassed. But it was only when her younger little grandson was attacked by a terrible illness and lay for days at the point of death that her buoyant courage failed. A letter written then owned that she had come to the one thing that she felt she couldn't bear.

She had a difficult journey to Hazebrouck, where the boy and his mother were staying, was told by an irritated official that it was not a time for civilians to travel; on which she comments: "He was quite right. It is not!" But she arrived. The child got better and she picked up her courage again, and, with her never-failing interest in the life around her, made friends with all classes: officers, soldiers, nurses, and tragical but brave refugees.

Only recently, relatives, returning to America, had reported her as well and cheerful, still able to dine out and go to the opera, and as occupied as ever with plans for the future.

Yet with all her absorbing interest in the passing show, with all her pleasure in living, there was another side to her. Like the rest of her family, she was born and bred in a religious belief. They took their religion simply and unquestioningly, that large, world-loving, and, in some ways, old-fashioned family. They took it just as it had been handed down to them. Their church and their world both meant much to them. Mary Waddington was faithful to her church and enjoyed her world whole-heartedly, and we may trust that she is enjoying the next one just

LLUSIONS are tent poles which bolster up the sagging moments. But on this particular morning the professor's wife was unable to find a single one with which to prop up her discouragement as she looked at the paper-hanger's bill. It was larger than she had expected. The dining-room wall-paper had just been changed with prayer and fasting. No; she had no illusions at all as she sat behind the coffee-pot and awaited the arrival of husband and son.

It was one of those harbinger-of-summer mornings, early in spring term, when wicked thoughts, like new spring hats, quicken the subconscious female mind. But Eugene had just had to go out of sailor-suits (the boys were all laughing at him) and Phil . . . Well, there he was now in his new Scotch tweed, standing before the hall mirror, arranging a front lock with an ever so sensitive forefinger. He had his senior poetry class this morning entirely female! She thought to herself somewhat bitterly that in the spring a professor's fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love lyrics, but hers was forced from hats to the sterner call of moths and winter blankets. Life was but a faded proposition, like last year's hat waiting to be recolorited and rebowed.

When a professor's wife has no illusions she is apt to have reactions. She felt one coming on.

For him. . . new tweed trousers! For her... the chore of keeping the creases in them! He could teach poetry-and write it. Verses all about the lovely white souls of ladies and his own slightly sullied one! But she must suppress all her literary desires-longings for trashy novels!

She, however, registered vague doubts about her husband's poems. If art is

truth, she was forced to reason, how could so incorruptible a man swear to a sullied soul! Why, he did not even smoke, and she . . . she longed secretly for a long and slender cigarette-holder between her first and second fingers.

The professor had seated himself opposite her, and was ripping open the New York papers, and hunting for the book reviews.

"When this one-horse Methodist college raises that endowment I can have some of these books I need!" he announced.

Books already spilled out of his study, all around the living-room and out into the dining-room, eternally beckoning to her dust-cloth.

"A life of Hazlitt at last!" His rapturous voice already fondled the tooled leather binding.

His wife, dwelling for one more poignant moment on that new hat, which she had fondled and laid firmly aside, looked across the dish of overscrambled eggs, and remarked inwardly that his eyes were too far apart.

And then up from the book reviews his too-far-apart eyes wandered to the wall back of his wife. And he made his second unfortunate remark.

"I'm not sure about this wall-paper. I think it has a greenish tinge!" At that his eyes looked so far apart that she hated him.

Once she had read an article in the Atlantic Monthly-he had pointed it out to her-which proved convincingly what caused divorces! She was all but in a cold perspiration at the memory. . . . Not cardinal sins at all-but little things like squints and hacking coughs, and eyes

too near together or-too far apart! And there were his, fairly yelling at her across the table: "See what a fine, incorruptible fellow I am!"

Two facts-desperadoes-leapt out of the future and faced her as, with collected

exterior, she poured the coffee. She would have to relinquish the delectable hat! She would have to sit another ten years before an imperfect background!

"My dear," she said—the endearment had a razor-blade edge-"will you kindly tell me who chose it?"

The professor, professing to be oversensitized to backgrounds, had insisted on making the final decision. But she knew he was apt to be more carnal than æsthetic in the dining-room. Even now, in the face of such an issue, he could turn to his coffee with avidity.

It was muddy and lukewarm! "My dear," he said-the endearment had a sandpaper grate-"can't this cook cook?"

"Did we ever have a cook who could cook until I taught her to cook? And did she ever remain our cook after she learned to cook? Two dollars more a week stand between you and a good cup of coffee, my dear!" She spoke indifferently, with half-shut eyes, focussed on the abysmal depths of low salaries.

Professors may be sensitive to backgrounds. Professors' wives have to create foregrounds. Foregrounds of passable dinners for a round of faculty-dreary enough with their yellow complexions and made-over gowns! For ten years the forerunner of this wall-paper had enhanced that dreariness. It had even caused her to use a little surreptitious rouge. (Phil had contracted for small Methodist ideas with his small salary.) It had caused her to yearn for a geranium evening gown to offset her dusky beauty. But any shade that screeched so loudly at the start and limped so feebly at the finish was IMPRACTICAL !

She dangled a bit of egg on the end of her fork. "I'll tell you something, Phil! There should be a special endowment raised by this college, spent exclusively to keep us women from looking like the wives of academic men!" Her collected exterior was momentarily in peril.

But Phil was not delicately attuned to emotions, excepting in himself. He did not see what this had to do with cooks and coffee. "What's the matter, Ellen? I don't see but that you look well enough always." And he ate absently-though

"Look well enough!" She merely thought it but fortissimo! To be sure her morning gingham was adequate covering and clean! But he wouldn't care if she came to breakfast in a Mother Hubbard.

Men! Unbearable creatures! So selfsatisfied! So sure of their wives! The greenish tinge-if she could only put it into his too-far-apart eyes!

Temporarily, not a sign of a conjugal illusion remained.

"At least we can have breakfast promptly, if not properly cooked." His hand groped for another slice of toast.

"What do you mean, Phil? We were hardly five minutes late!"

"Yes, my dear, but five minutes stand between comfort and indigestion."

"Gracious! Don't tell me you're adding another ailment to your hay-fever and tennis elbow. Where's Eugene? Eugene! Eugene!"

Tousled from an unvictorious fray with a four-in-hand, and a slide down the banisters, their son plumped into the third chair.

Even her maternal illusions were tottering. She looked at him coldly, as if to say: "This is not the child I expected to have when I married!" For she was completely baffled by his newly acquired stand-up collar and manly tie. Everything childlike and appealing seemed to have been discarded with his sailor-suit. She took refuge in a barrage of don'ts.

"Eugene, don't ever come to the table without brushing your hair!" Eugene looked to his father as higher court.

"Did you hear me? Go up and brush your hair at once!"

"Oh, let him stay and eat his porridge while it's hot!" said Phil.

She gulped the coffee she hadn't yearned to drink.

"We men'll stand together!" said Eugene's eyes to his paternal parent, and he helped himself to the rest of the coffee

cream.

"Gee! This stuff's darned cold now!" he said aloud.

"Eugene, if I hear you say 'gee' or 'darn' again, I'll—I'll-Phil, that's your job! Please take his language in hand.