"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here in the fire zone? You soldiers die—it is very easy to die—and leave us to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"
Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that she was about to become hysterical.
"Really, Miss Galland, I—women and children—I—" he was stammering.
"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."
"Miss Galland, you are overwrought. I—"
She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.
"Don't I look it—hysterical?" she exclaimed. "How awkward for you if I should fall on the floor and kick and scream!"
With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.
"That is not your way," he managed to say. He was quite adrift in confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman's subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm. Resorting to the last weapon in his armory—which the captain of engineers had already used—his attitude changed to a soldierly sternness. "Miss Galland, I feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure that—"
She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her eyes. He understood that she had again anticipated what he was going to say.