gments will not go
through the second wall."

"Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms," she
replied indifferently.

The fatalism of her attitude and his alarm lest she had gone a little
out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of
a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:

"Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize--"

He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers--touched a spot
of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.

"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here
in the fire zone? You soldiers die--it is very easy to die--and leave us
to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of
killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the
consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"

Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that
she was about to become hysterical.

"Really, Miss Galland, I--women and children--I--" he was stammering.

"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them
up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen
intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you,
but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away
rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."

"Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I--"

She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.

"Don't I look it--hysterical?" she exclaimed. "How awkward for you if I
should fall on the floor and kick and scream!"

With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she
looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.

"That is not your way," he managed to say. He was quite adrift in
confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's
subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last
weapon in his armory--which the captain of engineers had already
used--his attitude changed to a soldierly sternness. "Miss Galland, I
feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure
that--"

She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her
eyes. He understood that she had again anticipated what he was going to
say.

"There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren't there? And
the time has come for you to be firm!" The color in his cheeks deepened.