Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/142

 and insignificant-feeling girl in all France. When she had started out upon this adventure in America she had seemed to herself to be seizing an opportunity ordained for her by fate and entrusted to her as the instrument for a great deed; now the fact that she was here, and had come with an idea that she could greatly do, seemed the most assuming conceit in the world.

The next morning when she went out upon the avenues in the uniform, which now she was to wear constantly, the pettiness of her part reimpressed itself with every square she passed as she witnessed the throngs of soldiers—of a dozen races, of innumerable nations—gathered for the war. She went with Hubert to the American consulate, where she applied for a new passport to replace the ruined one; then, proceeding alone to the office where Cynthia Gail was to report, she accepted gladly the simple, routine duties assigned her.

That same day she and Milicent found a room in a pension upon the Rue des Saints Pères, where Hubert and Mrs. Mayhew called upon her the next evening. But if Gerry Hull had inquired for her at the Mayhew's, his inquiry resulted in no visit to the Rue des Saints Pères. Lieutenant Gerry Hull was transferred—so Ruth read in a Matin of the next week—to the American forces and was flying now under his own flag. And with his return to duty it seemed that he must have lost concern for a girl satisfied to do half-clerical, half-charity relief work among refugees in Paris.

Of course Ruth did not think of herself as merely doing such work; she considered herself as waiting for further instructions from the Germans.