earth to taste them with him. His wife shared all his
thoughts. She came of a scholarly family, was rather younger than he;
one of those serious, loving, weak, yet proud hearts, that must give
but only give themselves once. Her existence was bound up in Mairet's
interests. Perhaps she would have shared the life of another man
equally well, if circumstances had been different, but she had married
Mairet with everything that was his. Like many of the best of women,
her intelligence was quick to understand the man whom her heart had
chosen. She had begun by being his pupil, and became his partner,
helping in his work and in his laboratory researches. They had
no children and had every thought in common, both of them being
freethinkers, with high ideals, destitute of religion, as well as of
any national superstition.

In 1914 Mairet was mobilised, and went simply as a duty, without any
illusions as to the cause that he was called upon to serve by the
accidents of time and country. His letters from the front were clear
and stoical; he had never ceased to see the ignominy of the war. But
he felt obliged to sacrifice himself in obedience to fate, which
had made him a part of the errors, the sufferings, and the confused
struggles of an unfortunate animal species slowly evolving towards an
unknown end.

His family and the Clerambaults had known each other in the country,
before either of them were transplanted to Paris; this acquaintance
formed the basis of an amicable intercourse, solid rather than
intimate--for Mairet opened his heart to no one but his wife--but
resting on an esteem that nothing could shake.

They had not corresponded since the beginning of the war; each had
been too much absorbed by his own troubles. Men who went to fight
did not scatter their letters among their friends, but generally
concentrated on one person whom they loved best, and to whom they told
everything. Mairet's wife, as always, was his only confidante. His
letters were a journal in which he thought aloud; and in one of the
last he spoke of Clerambault. He had seen extracts from his first
articles in some of the nationalist papers which were the only ones
allowed at the front, where they were quoted with insulting comments.
He spoke of them to his wife, saying what comfort he had found in
these words of an honest man driven to speak out, and he begged her to
let Clerambault know that his old friendship for him was now all
the warmer and clo