w that
you do not have to go to war!"

In her anxiety for sacrifice, she wanted to go to the battlefields, and
yet at the same time, she was rejoicing to see her lover exempt from
military duty. This preposterous lack of logic was not gratefully
received by Julio but irritated him as an unconscious offense.

"One might suppose that she was protecting me!" he thought. "She is
the man and rejoices that I, the weak comrade, should be protected from
danger. . . . What a grotesque situation!" . . .

Fortunately, at times when Marguerite presented herself at the studio,
she was again her old self, making him temporarily forget his annoyance.
She would arrive with the same joy in a vacation that the college
student or the employee feels on a holiday. Responsibility was teaching
her to know the value of time.

"No classes to-day!" she would call out on entering; and tossing her
hat on a divan, she would begin a dance-step, retreating with infantile
coquetry from the arms of her lover.

But in a few minutes she would recover her customary gravity, the
serious look that had become habitual with her since the outbreak of
hostilities. She spoke often of her mother, always sad, but striving to
hide her grief and keeping herself up in the hope of a letter from her
son; she spoke, too, of the war, commenting on the latest events with
the rhetorical optimism of the official dispatches. She could describe
the first flag taken from the enemy as minutely as though it were
a garment of unparalleled elegance. From a window, she had seen the
Minister of War. She was very much affected when repeating the story of
some fugitive Belgians recently arrived at the hospital. They were the
only patients that she had been able to assist until now. Paris was not
receiving the soldiers wounded in battle; by order of the Government,
they were being sent from the front to the hospitals in the South.

She no longer evinced toward Julio the resistance of the first few days.
Her training as a nurse was giving her a certain passivity. She seemed
to be ignoring material attractions, stripping them of the spiritual
importance which she had hitherto attributed to them. She wanted to make
Julio happy, although her mind was concentrated on other matters.

One afternoon, she felt the necessity of communicating certain news
which had been filling her mind since the day before. Springing up from
the couch, she hunted for her handbag which contained a letter.