Light the fire? Why, what are women for? Even Hermann, my servant, would rebel if he instead of Clothilde had to light fires. But, on the other hand, forage? Go back across that immense field and walk from shop to shop on feet that had for some time past been unable to walk at all? And then return weighed down with the results?
“Do you understand fires, Baron?” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, appearing suddenly behind me.
“As much, I suppose, as intelligence unaided by experience does,” said I unwillingly.
“Oh, but of course you do,” said she, putting a box of matches—one of those enormous English boxes that never failed to arouse my amused contempt, for they did not light a single fire or candle more than their handy little continental brethren—into my right hand, and the red handkerchiefful of sticks bought that morning into my left, “of course you do. You must have got quite used to them in the wars.”
“What wars?” I asked sharply. “You surely do not imagine that I——”
“Oh, were you too young for Sedan and all that?” she asked, as she crossed over the very long and very green grass toward a distant ditch and I found that I was expected to cross with her.
“I was so young,” I said, more nettled than my hearers will perhaps understand, but then I was tired out and no longer able to bear much, “so young that I had not even reached the stage of being born.”
“Not really?” said she.
“Yes,” said I. “I was still spending my birthdays among the angels.”
This, of course, was not strictly true, but one likes to take off a few years in the presence of a woman who has left her Gotha Almanach at home, and it was, I felt, a picturesque notion—I mean about the birthdays and the angels.