isn't any. I can't tell at all whether he likes me. An Englishman is always like that, completely shut up behind his face. It may be at this very moment he has made up his mind that I am a spy. He has read only four letters—
And he looks up suddenly, in his hand the letter from Mrs. Belmont in New York introducing me to the Duchess of Marlborough. He nods down the line to all the other military eyes fixed on me: "She's all right. Let her go."
I sign on the dotted line. And everything is over! In a flashing moment like that, it is accomplished. And a letter to "Our Duchess" has done it. At the magic of the name of the American woman who was Consuelo Vanderbilt, this steel like line of British officers quietly sheathes all opposition!
The soldier at the other end of the room opens a little wooden door in a wooden wall that lets me into England. My baggage is already being chalk marked "passed." I am here! I clutch my passport happily and convulsively in my hand. You have to do that until you can restore it to the safer place. It's the most important item in what the French call your "pieces de identitie." At any moment a policeman in the Strand, a gendarme in the Avenue de l'Opera may tap an alien on the shoulder with the pertinent inquiry, Who are you?
THE WAY OF JOURNALISM IN WAR TIME NOT EASY
London, when we reached it that night in October, lay under the black pall of darkness in which the
