“But that is being revengeful, my dear child. And so short-sighted, too. You don’t change people’s hearts by making them suffer. You harm yourself as well as them.”
“I do not think we want to change their hearts.” Alix, all unversed in these large subjects as she was, felt herself impelled to make the answer so obvious to every French mind. “I do not think we care about their hearts. When a bad man is guillotined, it is sufficient that his head should be gone. His heart does not concern us.”
Giles at this laughed loudly and Aunt Bella’s eye-glassed gaze turned to glitter reprobation at him. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying, Giles. She is too young to have followed or understood the lamentable policy of her country. You really shouldn’t encourage her.”
“But it seems to me she has been following. She’s made the only honest answer. Have you heard people talking about it a good deal, Alix?”
She did not mind his mirth or Aunt Bella’s reprobation. She did not care at all what they thought about France. How could one expect even English friends really to understand? “I have heard people talk at Maman’s,” she said.
Blaise was on a chair beside her eating an excellent dinner, and Giles, still laughing, said: “Do you know what he looks like? A Boche baby. There was one born in a village we occupied after the Germans had been there for two years. It was the funniest, jolliest little fellow; but awfully ugly; with a face just like that.”
“But it was half French, I imagine,” said Alix dryly.
“Certainly half French, I regret to say. But he looked all German. And I’m sure that if you’d had to take care of him you’d have been as kind to him as you are to your kitten.”
“I do not care for babies,” Alix objected.
“You’d have been kind to him all the same. You wouldn’t have wanted to see his head cut off.”