“One can be drowned.”
“One can swim.”
“Would you be happy? Should you like it? Anyway, forget what I said. Can one write to naval officers?”
“They may even answer.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes.”
Her sharp heels rang on the staircase. And every month since she has written two pages to her patron, the officer, the bourgeois.
“My father is happy,” says the letter in the last mail. “They have put him fifty kilometers nearer the Boches. My young brother has had his foot frozen, the other has lost his left arm, and won the Croix de Guerre. You see that all my people are well. They are bored in the trenches. They would like very much to get at the Germans. The officers say that that will come later. One believes them, doesn’t one, because they get themselves killed first, and do not risk their men’s lives? You are very fortunate to be an officer, and if in the navy they are like what they are in the army, I am well content with France which....”
Thus writes my rebel of former days; sincere to-day as then, she is the happier now for hating nobody.