"En voiture!" shouted an employee running down the quai.
They scrambled into their car hastily, but turned at the door for last remarks. "We've left a deposit in the bank for your friend with the tenement-house children," they suddenly remembered to assure me, "enough for a couple of years, and then, whenever she needs it, we're right here."
Mrs. Hall, on a sudden impulse, stooped low to give me a good-bye kiss. "I do hope your husband gets back all right from the front!" she said earnestly, divining the constant anxiety of my every moment, and then, her eyes shining, "Oh, my dear, I wonder if anybody ever was so lucky as to have such a perfectly, perfectly lovely honeymoon as Robert and I!"
The train began very slowly to move. I walked along beside it, dreading to see the last of those clear eyes. They smiled and waved their hands. They looked like super-people, the last inhabitants of the world before the war, the only happy human beings left.
I looked after them longingly. The smooth, oily movement of the train de luxe was accelerated. They were gone.
I went soberly back into the big echoing station and out into the dingy winter Paris street.
I had not gone ten steps before I was quite sure again that I had made them up, out of my head.
LA PHARMACIENNE
When the war broke out, Madeleine Brismantier was the very type and epitome of all which up to that time had been considered "normal" for a modern woman, a nice, modern woman. She had been put through the severe and excellent system of French public education in her native town of Amiens, and had done so well with her classes that when she was nineteen her family were thinking of feeding her into the hopper of the system of training for primary teachers. But just then, when on a visit in a smallish Seine-et-Marne town, she met the fine, upstanding young fellow who was to be her husband. He was young too, not then quite through the long formidable course of study for pharmacists, so that it was not until two years later, when Madeleine was twenty-one and he twenty-five, that they were married, and Madeleine left Amiens to live in Mandriné, the town where they had met.