“Then you’d better find something. I dislike to see a girl of your age sitting with her hands in her lap.”
“Oh, do let her alone, Clothilde,” Madame Le Brun protested peevishly. “She may do as she pleases this evening when her friend has just come.”
“You spoil her, Marcelline,” declared the elder sister.
“Not more than you do Victor.”
Madame Guerin bridled. “Not more than I do? You can say that when you know that Victor is here on his permission, that he suffers in the trenches and that nothing should be denied him? What would you? Is a soldier fighting for his country to be treated like an idle girl?”
“Here, here, stop your quarreling, you two old children,” spoke up Victor. “I will spend my permission in Paris the next time, if you begin to wrangle about me. Grandmother, may I have this?” He held up a small book.
“What is it?” She turned her head, at the same time pulling the cat farther upon her lap from which he seemed in danger of slipping.
“It is selections from the discourses of Epictetus. It belonged to my father.”
“It is not one of those objectionable books unfit for a young man to read, and not to be mentioned before young ladies?”
Victor laughed and opened the book at random. “Listen to this and then you can judge if it be improper. ‘What matters to me anything that happens while I have greatness of soul?’” He turned over a few pages and again read: “Shall not the fact that God is our Maker, and Father, and Guardian free us from griefs and terrors?”