Any woman who reads this will know how I felt in my pride when a malicious wind whisked my fur right off my shoulders, and flung it through the back window, far on the road behind.
If it hadn't been sable I would have let it go out of sheer humiliation.
But instead, after a moment's fierce struggle, remembering all the wardrobe I had already lost in Antwerp, I whispered gustily, "My stole! It's blown right out of the window."
How did I hope the journalist would not be cross, for we were racing back then against time, without lights, and it was highly important to get off these crowded roads with the soldiers coming and going, coming and going, before night fell.
Cross indeed!
I needn't have worried.
Absence of fuss, was, as I decided later, the most salient point about this man. In fact, his whole desire seemed to make himself into an entire nonentity. He never asserted himself. He never interfered. He never made any suggestions. He just sat quiet and calm in his corner of the car, puffing away at his big cigar.
Another curious thing about him was the way in which this man, used to bossing, organizing, suggesting, commanding, fell into his part, which was by force of circumstances a very minor one.
He was incognito. He was not the eminent journalist at all. He was just an eager man, out looking at a War. He was there,—in a manner of speaking, on suffrance. For in War time, civilians are not wanted at the Front! And nobody recognized this more acutely than the man with the cigar between his lips, and the short grey knee breeches showing sturdy legs in their dark grey stockings and thick laced-up boots.
The impression he gave me was of understanding absolutely the whole situation, and of a curiously technical comprehension of the wee little tiny part that he could be allowed to play.