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By Root 9048 0

that Mr. Ras-mussen seemed to be everywhere she went, sending her flowers and theatre tickets, coming around with automobiles to take her riding, sending her little blue pneumatiques ful of tender messages. Eleanor teased her about her new Romeo. Then Paul Johnson turned up in Paris, having gotten himself into the Sorbonne detachment, and used to come around to her place on the rue de Bussy in the late afternoons and sit watching her silently and lugubriously. He and Mr. Rasmussen would sit there talking about wheat and the stockyards, while Eveline dressed to go out with somebody else, usual y Eleanor and J.W. Eveline could see that J.W. always liked to have her along as wel as Eleanor when they went out in the evenings; it was just that wel dressed American girls were rare in Paris at that time, she told herself, and that J.W. liked to be seen with them and to have them along when he took important people out to dinner. She and Eleanor treated each other with a stiff nervous sarcasm now, except occasional y when they were alone together, they talked like in the old days, laughing at people and happenings together. Eleanor would never let a chance pass to poke fun at her Romeos. Her brother George turned up at the office one day with a captain's two silver bars on his shoulders. His whip-cord uniform fitted like a glove, his puttees shone and he wore spurs. He'd been in the intel igence service attached to the British and had just come down from Germany

where he'd been an interpreter on General McAndrews'

staff. He was going to Cambridge for the spring term and cal ed everybody blighters or rotters and said the food at the restaurant where Eveline took him for lunch was

-305-simply ripping. After he'd left her, saying her ideas were not cricket, she burst out crying. When she was leaving the office that afternoon, thinking gloomily about how George had grown up to be a horrid little prig of a brass-hat, she met Mr. Rasmussen under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli; he was carrying a mechanical canarybird. It was a stuffed canary and you wound it up underneath the cage. Then it fluttered its wings and sang. He made. her stop on the corner while he made it sing. "I'm going to send that back home to the kids," he said. "My wife and I are separated but I'm fond of the kids; they live in Pasadena . . . I've had a very unhappy life." Then he invited Eveline to step into the Ritz bar and have a cock-tail with him. Robbins was there with a redheaded news-paper woman from San Francisco. They sat at a wicker table together and drank Alexanders. The bar was

crowded. "What's the use of a league of nations if it's to be dominated by Great Britain and her colonies?" said Mr. Rasmussen sourly. "But don't you think any kind of a league's better than nothing?" said Eveline. "It's not the name you give things, it's who's getting theirs underneath that counts," said Robbins.

"That's a very cynical remark," said the California woman. "This isn't any time to be cynical."

"This is a time," said Robbins, "when if we weren't cynical we'd shoot ourselves." In March Eveline's two week leave came around.

Eleanor was going to make a trip to Rome to help wind up the affairs of the office there, so they decided they'd go down on the train together and spend a few days in Nice. They needed to get the damp cold of Paris out of their bones. Eveline felt as excited as a child the afternoon when they were al packed and ready to go and had bought

-306-wagon lit reservations and gotten their transport orders signed. Mr. Rasmussen insisted on seeing her off and ordered up a big dinner in the restaurant at the Gare de Lyon that Eveline was too excited to eat, what with the smel of the coalsmoke and the thought of waking up where it would be sunny and warm. Paul Johnson appeared when they were about half through, saying he'd come to help them with their bags. He'd lost one of the buttons off his uniform and he looked gloomy and mussed up. He said he wouldn't eat anything but nervously drank down sev-eral glasses of wine. Both he and Mr. Rasmussen looked