ended was to
confront this fair, strange, cold, cruel thing, and see if she were of
flesh and blood like other living beings, and do the best that could be
done to outrage, to scourge, to challenge, to deride her with all the
insolent artillery of camp ribaldry, and show her how a child of the
people could laugh at her rank, and affront her purity, and scorn her
power. Definite idea there was none to her; she had come on impulse.
But a vague longing in some way to break down that proud serenity which
galled her so sharply, and bring hot blood of shame into that delicate
face, and cast indignity on that imperious and unassailable pride,
consumed her.

She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old
Invalide had done in the '89--a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the
Cannebiere, who had loved one above her rank, a noble who deserted her
for a woman of his own Order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like,
scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter and the
languid luster of sweet, contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore her
wrong in silence--she was a daughter of the south and of the populace,
with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced
with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy
mistral. She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won,
while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the
people were made drunk at the bridal of their chatelaine in those hot,
ruddy, luscious autumn days.

She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by
the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the
scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She stood and saw the ax fall down
on the proud, snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent there,
and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and smote
the lips his lips had kissed,--a cruel blow that blurred their beauty
out,--and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and drew
it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and over
the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting crowds of the
multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the waves
flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to make
their feast. She stood and laughed by the side of the gray, angry water,
watching the tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of
sea-t