"I haven't written to you, Odette, because I was too lazy, and because I need to imagine the face of the person to whom I write. So far away, under your nurse's cap, I couldn't tell—you are pretty; I love you always. Oh, how sorry I am for you!"
Odette, surprised, embarrassed, still under the influence of the life she had been leading, spoke as every one did:
"There are so many of us who deserve to be pitied."
"No, Odette, no; I am not saying that. No doubt there are many widows and many young women whose husbands or lovers are maimed, disfigured, ruined. But there are not many who, before all that, have truly enjoyed life and love. You have known love. You have had a few years that are worth being regretted."
Tears rose to Odette's eyes. They were tears that gave no pain, which rather comforted her. It seemed that she had long been waiting to shed such tears. She had so constantly heard conventional words, forced expressions, the result of a strained situation which there was surely no reason to criticise; but, except from her wounded soldiers, she had not before heard words simply human.
Clotilde was not afraid to talk persistently of Jean, not because she felt that at bottom she was giving pleasure to her friend, but because her thoughts naturally turned to attractive things, and she loved to remember that charming couple of perfect lovers that Jean and Odette had been. Never having checked her instinct, it now told her that Odette, in spite of her tears, enjoyed the revival of these memories. It was not Jean the soldier, Jean the hero, whose praises Clotilde sang. Odette had heard so many praises of heroes! She had handled so many with her own hands! There had never been but one Jean. He was Jean, just Jean, a fine, good, and handsome fellow who had nothing military, nothing surprising about him, except just that he was beloved. Who had dared to talk to her of that Jean since the war? No one. Clotilde was doing it in the unconsciousness of a woman who was still what she had been before. And Odette had felt some apprehension about seeing Clotilde again, just because she had feared that Clotilde had really not changed enough!
The interview was soothing, even delightful to her. Clotilde seemed almost to have forgotten the war—a little more and she would have made her forget it. She talked of the books that she was reading; books written earlier than the present time; she talked, too, laughingly of her clothes, on the pretext of the diminished resources of the family; she spoke of certain middle-aged and even old men, saying that they had not been appreciated in the days when there had been plenty of young fellows. She offered her friend a cigarette; she smoked, and the two women looked at each other through curls of long, light clouds, as if in a dream.
Odette went out somewhat amazed at the incredible ivory tower which Clotilde had succeeded in building around her youth, her beauty, and her selfishness.
"Is Clotilde selfish?" she asked herself, as she turned from the Square of the United States. "And yet how she asked about my Jean! Clotilde is like every one else; she is interested in just one thing, has a passion for it. She has kept as by a miracle the one thing that she had before the war, and that is love. Everything that represents love captivates her; one feels that she gives herself up to it. The others yield to a different passion which, by the conditions of our time, takes on a more sympathetic form. Mme. de Blauve with sacred fury throws all her family into the jaws of Moloch; Mme. de Calouas, in Surville, has a passion only for the wounded, exclusively for wounded soldiers; I have seen her utterly insensible to an accident to a civilian; most of those women in the hospital had a passion for their duties there, thought themselves degraded when they had not the number of beds that satisfied their pride, lamented as if for a public misfortune when, by chance, fewer wounded soldiers came. There are even people whose passion it is to have no passions—and they are the most to be dreaded. Why should Clotilde deprive herself of her bouquet of carnations, her pot of hyacinths, her perfumed cigarettes, while they serve to create around her the illusion by which she lives, and of which, when the occasion comes, she gives her weary friends the benefit for a whole hour? Yet, could I do like her? No; decidedly not. Did not I, then, love love as she does? I do not know, I loved Jean. Then I am less simple than she; everything affects me. And everything is shaken. I am not flattering myself when I recognize that I am alive to more than one thing. I wanted to be wholly devoted to one—to my sorrow. I believe that I am alive only to my grief, and yet sometimes I think that in this I am mistaken."
That day she felt an overwhelming lassitude. Clotilde had lapped her in "soft odors." As she was asking herself how she could finish the day she bethought her that she had been told that Mme. Leconque was another Clotilde, that is to say, a fairy capable of drawing one out of the war mood, though she belonged to a social set that was just now holding it as a great honor to give to it unstintingly both life and fortune.