Girl Philippa

An American engineer in France in 1914 is drawn into the counter-espionage of the first weeks of the war by a girl whose loyalty he cannot establish. Robert Chambers wrote fast and elegantly and had a genuine eye for the moment when a country changes. The book is a romance built on a real anxiety, and the crowd scenes in Paris are the best of it. Thirty paintings from the century around it, by Chase, Sargent and others, carry the same theme of Americans abroad in a Europe on the edge of change.