And yet, that day, on coming out of his bath, Jean had become so wrought up in talking of the army that he had almost made his wife afraid! She had thrown her arms around him as he wrapped himself in his bathrobe, saying:
"Don't talk so, Jean! Oh, imagine, if even you were to be so much as disfigured by an ugly wound! Your lovely eyes, my darling! Your beautiful teeth!—No, that would drive me wild!"
And because he had laughed, laughed heartily, so as completely to close his lovely eyes, she had at once thought of something else.
Without ever thinking of going even slightly into subjects of this sort, she had been buoyed up by a great credulity, born of optimism; not, indeed, as to war, which interested her not the least, but as to Jean, who alone was of consequence, and who, as a "reserve officer," she was sure could not be called to take part in a campaign. It was an artless idea, rooted in her mind by the pressure of her exuberant happiness. For nothing in the world would she have tried to get at the root of it, lest the result should prove uncomfortable. It was the same self-indulgent, mental indolence which, for example, had withheld her from asking herself the meaning of words that dropped from her husband's lips:
"Well, here I am, attached to the covering troops. You and I will not be able to go into Touraine." Well, they would not be able to go into Touraine; they would go somewhere else.
Then memory carried her on to the beginning of last season, at the seashore. The weather had been so fine! Jean had been so lucky as to get his vacation from his commercial house by the 15th of July; they had gone to Surville. The Hotel de Normandie was already well filled, the Casino was crowded, sports were humming, the Little Theatre was exhibiting Parisian vedettes, a row of autos was sending vile smells up to the terrace where every one sat of afternoons imbibing soft drinks and roasting in the sun to the music of the gypsy orchestra; elegant young men were displaying khaki costumes, martingales, and broad-brimmed hats. In the evening every one had danced the tango in the hall. The great stir of the watering-place had begun—futile doings without number, comings and goings, from bar to bar, from casino to casino, from luncheon to luncheon.
"Oh, say, are you coming? Look here, Jean! Aren't you tiresome, always reading despatches! One would say that you were expecting something to happen. What concern is it of yours?"
Every evening, on their way to the great hall of the Casino through the gallery that looked out upon the sea, whether going to the theatre or the music-hall, or simply intending to sit down and drink their coffee or their camomile, they had found a crowd of, men in tuxedos standing before the frame that hung on the right of the door, on which despatches from Paris and quotations of the Bourse were posted. Odette could still hear the reproaches she had addressed to her husband as he returned with unwonted seriousness from reading them.
"Well, what about it all?" she had asked. Jean had kept back some of the more sensational news, but one evening he had added:
"There is an ultimatum to Serbia."