"But I have something to tell you, my friend; Misson, the husband of our good Rose, whom we have so often ridiculed because he stuck to his automobile— Well, he has been killed, the good fellow, blown to pieces by the bursting of a shell, as he was driving some officers——"
"Oh, my dear Rose! I must hasten to her!"
"Do not go yet. It happened on the road to Rheims. She has obtained leave to go for his body— Do you know what Mme. Leconque said, when she learned that Misson's body had been blown to fragments by a bursting shell? She said: 'In his auto?—What a stupid death!' The death that one receives in an automobile, you see, is not noble. It was, we now learn, the one-hundred-and-fourth time that a shell has fallen within less than thirty metres of his machine, and the ninth machine that has been struck in the course of his journeys. He will forever be unrecognized."
Odette could not refrain from wiping her eyes.
La Villaumer, who lost nothing of her actions, said to her:
"You are weeping for another sorrow than your own?"
"Is that what you think?" asked Odette; "it is still my sorrow; it is he who makes me more alive to the sorrows of others."
"Yes, but from the moment when you can thus weep for others your own grief becomes more tolerable."
"I would not wish to suffer less."
"You are not suffering less; there is room in your heart for a still greater sorrow."