In the first place, she had not anticipated liking Paris. She had only consented to make the trip because they were in need of rest and the other girls had chosen Paris. Everything she had ever heard or read concerning Paris had made her feel prejudiced against the city. Moreover, it was totally unlike Eastport, Massachusetts, where Eugenia had been born and bred and where she had received most of her ideas of life.
Yet there was no denying that there was something about Paris that took hold even of Eugenia Peabody’s repressed imagination.
It was a brilliant autumn afternoon. The taxicab rattled along the Champs Elysées, under the marvelous Arc de Triomphe and then turned into the wooded spaces of the Bois.
Every now and then Eugenia found a lump rising in her throat and her heart beating curiously fast. It was all so beautiful, both in art and nature. Surely it was impossible to believe that there could be an enemy mad enough to destroy a city that could never be restored to its former loveliness.
Perchance the war had purified Paris, taking away its uglier side in the healing influence of patriotism. For even Eugenia’s New England eyes and conscience could find but little to criticize. Naturally many of the costumes worn by the young women she considered reprehensible. The colors were too bright, the skirts were too short. French women were really too stylish for her severer tastes. For there was little black to be seen. This was a gala afternoon, so whatever one’s personal sorrow, today Paris honored the living.
Before Eugenia consented to listen Lieutenant Hume had arrived in the middle of his story, and then she listened only half-heartedly. She was interested chiefly because the young Captain she had met the evening before was so far from one’s idea of a hero. He was more like a figure of a manikin dressed to represent an officer and set up in a shop window. His features were too perfect, he was too graceful, too debonair! But in truth Eugenia’s idea of a soldier must still have been represented by the type of man who, shouldering a musket and still in his farmer’s clothes, marched out to meet the enemy at Bunker Hill.
Some day Eugenia would learn that it takes all manner of men and women to make a world. And that there are worthwhile people and things that do not come from Boston.
“He was in the face of the enemy’s fire when a shell exploded under his horse,” Lieutenant Hume explained. “He and the horse were shot twenty feet in the air. When they came down to earth again there was an immense hole in the ground beneath them and both man and horse were plunged into it. Rather like having one’s grave dug ahead of time, isn’t it?”
Nona nodded, leaning across from her seat in the cab with her golden brown eyes darkening with excitement and her hands clasped tight together in her lap.
Eugenia kept her eyes upon her even while giving her attention to the narrative. Personally she considered Nona unusually pretty and attractive and the idea worried her now and then. For there were to be no romances if she could prevent them while the four American Red Cross girls were in Europe. If they wished such undesirable possessions as husbands they must wait and marry their own countrymen.