"He is very much touched by it."
"But, my dear friends, who is there who is not?"
"Mme. de Boulainvilliers has distributed her entire fortune among war works; she has mortgaged her house to enable her to support an auxiliary hospital which she has opened in it; she is already begging right and left. She will come to be a charge upon the public charities. All her sons have been killed; but her relatives are furious."
"Little do I care about relatives," said Odette; "she is doing a good thing, and all the more because every one knows that she isn't in the least pretentious. 'There is no great merit in what I am doing,' the old lady says modestly. 'Why, I shall soon be seventy years old; if I do not take care of my wounded the state will have to do it, and that would impair the fortune of my relatives as well as of everybody else.' But she does not say everything that she thinks. What she thinks is much simpler than that; she enjoys, above all things, making little creams for her soldiers. 'But for my hospital,' she says, 'they wouldn't get any!'"
"Have you heard of Clotilde's adventure?" asked Simone.
"My goodness! has Clotilde too been touched by the war?"
"Oh, in the most unexpected way. You know that she vowed to keep the war away from her. Her husband is at General Headquarters; when she sees him she forbids him to speak about the war. But Avvogade had a friend of his childhood, a school comrade—a man whom one never met at their house in the old days—a modest employee in a Trust Company, but a tall, well-made fellow. The poor fellow lost his sight as the result of trepanning. His condition produced a great effect upon Avvogade; Avvogade suddenly felt all the old friendship for his comrade revive; he goes to him as often as he can, takes him out to walk, brings him home to lunch. Clotilde dares not object, but she is simply aghast. The mutilated man's conversation does not interest her and the sight of him horrifies her. 'We don't talk about the war,' says her husband. 'I am not breaking our agreement.' They don't talk about the war, but this man with his closed eyes embodies the war to her, and thus the war has entered her house. And no one has anything to say to her but: 'You can't escape it, my dear.' If Clotilde was not such a dear every one would laugh, for, after all, her trouble is not a great one and there is something absurd in the adventure."
[XXIII]
As she went about among her friends Odette perceived that she was regarded in Paris as one of the women who during the war was sacrificing herself for the public good. One must have a "war" reputation at all costs. No one said a word as to her conduct as a widow, or as to her moral ideas. But because she had been absent and was known to have been for a long time a hospital nurse, every one ascribed to her that spirit of self-abnegation which gives reason to expect all things from certain exceptional persons, born for sublimities. The compliments that she received were not ironical. Her profound and unalterable grief for her husband's death, the very discretion which she observed in making no lamentation before her friends, were not lost upon them. Odette, sad and silent, enjoyed what might be called "a good press." The praises bestowed upon her simply transformed into extraordinary virtue what was only natural to her. At first she found it stupid; then it disturbed her.
"But what am I, after all?" she would ask.