Then Dolly came in, as fragile and pale and lovely as the orchid. It was ten months since he had seen her. How delightfully her hair was done, and her fingers, rose-tipped like sea-shells! She came to him, her flower-face lifted.
He said, "Oh, my dear, I am so dirty."
Some one had followed her into the room, a woman in deep mourning. It was the little Juriac, Lisette de Juriac, and she was quite unchanged. Not even her heavy crape changed her. How was it possible that she was not changed? How could she still be beautiful?
She came forward saying, "I was here with Dolly; I could not go, and not see you. I must stop just a moment to speak to you."
He took her hand and held it, and did not know what to say to her. He was seeing again that which he had seen not six weeks ago. He had seen many men die horribly, horribly. But if he thought too much of how his friend, her husband, had died, kept too vividly, too long, seeing it, he would go mad. Why was she not gone mad? She had loved her husband, who had loved her. They had been happy together.
He had a sudden hatred of her because she was not gone mad. Because there was some becoming white thing about her face to soften the harshness of the crape, and because there were pearls around her throat; he had a crazy desire to take her, his two hands clutching her shoulders, and tell her how René died, tell her the horror, burnt, burnt, burnt, make her see what he could not stop seeing. Because of the white frill and the pearls, he wanted to make her see it and feel it, and go down crushed under the realization of it. He would have made her ugly, as suffering makes ugly. When she was ugly he would believe she suffered. He could not move or speak, for he would have seized her and told her.
She was saying, "You were with him in the attack, you saw him fall, and you went back and tried to save him." She had her black gloves and parasol in her hand, and a little black bag, soft, like the gloves. She was trying to open the little black bag to get something out of it. She was beginning to cry.
Dolly, saying, "Poor dear, poor dear," took the gloves and parasol from her and found a scrap of a handkerchief for her in the bag. "Poor dear, poor dear." She put her arm around Lisette and patted her eyes with the tiny handkerchief. "Darling, it was a glorious death, you know, like that, in action, beautiful, the death he would have chosen. Jacques, tell her."
Tell her? He was trying not to tell her. He stood there looking at his friend's wife and trying not to tell her of the hands that had moved and moved, beating and beating the air.
"Tell her how fearless he was," Dolly was saying, "and how proud she must be of him."