"Is it really so early?"
Her sisterly tenderness divined that he had something to tell her, something important, and that it would be necessary to help him to tell it. "Come in," she said.
He opened the blinds and sat down at the foot of the bed.
"What scouting have you done this morning?"
But he was following his own thoughts: "The men had warned me that under those circumstances one receives a very disagreeable impression."
"Under what circumstances?"
"When one goes up again after having been wounded, and meets a Boche. As long as you have not been wounded you think nothing can happen to you. When I saw that Boche this morning I felt something quite new. Then...."
He stopped and laughed, as if he had played some schoolboy joke.
"Then, what did you do?"
"Well, I made up my mind to submit to his shots. Calmly."