The médecin-major frowned. His ascetic features hardened again.
“Mon cher commandant, you do me too much honour,” he said coldly. “I assure you that there is no living woman who can interest me.”
“Bah!” said the battalion-commander a trifle fatuously, “moi, je suis connaisseur dans ces affaires-lá! I am sure that something is going to happen between you and that woman. I can always feel that sort of thing in the air like—” he hesitated for an illustration, “like some people can see ghosts.”
The doctor looked him in the eyes.
“Mon Commandant,” he said, curtly, “if you could see ghosts you would not feel so sure.”
There was a moment of unpleasant silence. The captain broke it by shouting for the orderlies.
The three officers were introduced to their rooms and parted to perform their toilet before dinner.
The meal which followed in the rather overfurnished Speisezimmer was overshadowed by the gloomy taciturnity of the doctor who appeared still to resent the battalion-commander’s suggestions of gallantry. Not all the sprightly sallies of the adjutant, not the persistent bonhomie of the battalion-commander, resolutely ignoring any hostility between himself and the doctor, could bring a smile into that hard-set face with the sombre eyes. Their hostess did not appear again and was not mentioned between them. When they had finished, the captain suggested that they should smoke their cigars in the Salon.
“I feel I want to put my feet on the piano,” he said, with a vague remembrance of a popular picture, “like the boches at Versailles in ’seventy! To infect our hostess’s curtains with cigar-smoke is a poor compromise, but it is something! Allons, messieurs!—let us indulge in hideous reprisals! The boche has devastated our homes—let us avenge ourselves by spoiling his curtains!”
The battalion-commander looked smilingly across to the doctor.