life through, in the
battalions of Africa.

She saw him, as he went beneath her balcony; and she sung all the
louder, she flung her sweetmeat missiles with reckless force; she
launched bolts of tenfold more audacious raillery at the delighted mob
below. Cigarette was "bon soldat"; when she was wounded, she wound her
scarf round the nerve that ached, and only laughed the gayer.

And he did her that injustice which the best among us are apt to do
to those whom we do not feel interest enough in to study with that
closeness which can alone give comprehension of the intricate and
complex rebus, so faintly sketched, so marvelously involved, of human
nature.

He thought her a little leopard, in her vivacious play and her inborn
bloodthirstiness.

Well, the little leopard of France played recklessly enough that
evening. Algiers was en fete, and Cigarette was sparkling over the
whole of the town like a humming-bird or a firefly--here and there, and
everywhere, in a thousand places at once, as it seemed; staying long
with none, making music and mirth with all. Waltzing like a thing
possessed, pelting her lovers with a tempest storm of dragees, standing
on the head of a gigantic Spahi en tableau amid a shower of fireworks,
improvising slang songs, and chorused by a hundred lusty lungs that
yelled the burden in riotous glee as furiously as they were accustomed
to shout "En avant!" in assault and in charge, Cigarette made amends to
herself at night for her vain self-sacrifice of the fete-day.

She had her wound; yes, it throbbed still now and then, and stung like a
bee in the warm core of a rose. But she was young, she was gay, she was
a little philosopher; above all, she was French, and in the real French
blood happiness runs so richly that it will hardly be utterly chilled
until the veins freeze in the coldness of death. She enjoyed--enjoyed
all the more fiercely, perhaps, because a certain desperate bitterness
mingled with the abandonment of her Queen Mab-like revelries. Until
now Cigarette had been as absolutely heedless and without a care as
any young bird, taking its first summer circles downward through the
intoxication of the sunny air. It was not without fiery resistance and
scornful revolt that the madcap would be prevailed on to admit that any
shadow could have power to rest on her.

She played through more than half the night, with the agile, bounding,
graceful play of the young leopard to which he had likened he