II

He succeeded in this object no better than the rest of the garrison and
the whole of society. The two young officers, of no especial consequence
till then, became distinguished by the universal curiosity as to the
origin of their quarrel. Madame de Lionne's salon was the centre of
ingenious surmises; that lady herself was for a time assailed with
inquiries as the last person known to have spoken to these unhappy and
reckless young men before they went out together from her house to
a savage encounter with swords, at dusk, in a private garden. She
protested she had noticed nothing unusual in their demeanour. Lieutenant
Feraud had been visibly annoyed at being called away. That was natural
enough; no man likes to be disturbed in a conversation with a lady
famed for her elegance and sensibility" But, in truth, the subject
bored Madame de Lionne since her personality could by no stretch of
imagination be connected with this affair. And it irritated her to hear
it advanced that there might have been some woman in the case. This
irritation arose, not from her elegance or sensibility, but from a more
instinctive side of her nature. It became so great at last that she
peremptorily forbade the subject to be mentioned under her roof. Near
her couch the prohibition was obeyed, but farther off in the salon
the pall of the imposed silence continued to be lifted more or less. A
diplomatic personage with a long pale face resembling the countenance
of a sheep, opined, shaking his head, that it was a quarrel of long
standing envenomed by time. It was objected to him that the men
themselves were too young for such a theory to fit their proceedings.
They belonged also to different and distant parts of France. A
subcommissary of the Intendence, an agreeable and cultivated bachelor
in keysermere breeches, Hessian boots and a blue coat embroidered with
silver lace, who affected to believe in the transmigration of souls,
suggested that the two had met perhaps in some previous existence.
The feud was in the forgotten past. It might have been something quite
inconceivable in the present state of their being; but their souls
remembered the animosity and manifested an instinctive antagonism. He
developed his theme jocularly. Yet the affair was so absurd from the
worldly, the military, the honourable, or the prudential point of view,
that this weird explanation seemed rather more reasonable than any
other.

The two officers had confided no