"We meet love everywhere," said Odette. "I find it springing up under my feet wherever I go; in the operating-room, at the bedside of the wounded and the dying. The towns nearest to the front are fuller of it than any others, it would seem. They say that it has never caused such a stir."
"It represents life, which must be perpetuated, whatever happens. In your case, my dear Odette, love is joined to death, but in general, no; it severs itself from death. Those of our day who sing of love and practise it are more surely serving the future than those who conceive of restraint as the sole virtue."
In spite of herself, these unpremeditated words brought a sudden light into the perplexed thoughts with which Odette's persistent sorrow and her natural disposition as a loving young woman inspired Clotilde. She felt impelled to cry out to her: "You think you are loving a dead man, my poor dear! but you are not twenty-eight years old; you are in love with love; it is always here, and is waiting for you!"
Both of them were equally incapable of disguising the truth as it appeared to them. Odette, bound by a tie whose almost inconceivable strength kept down every other sort of desire; Clotilde simply deep in love to the point of hardly being able to imagine a case different from her own. By chance she had not uttered words which deeply wound a bleeding heart, but Odette's acute senses at once perceived that there is hardly any conversation possible even upon the dearest subject that they may have in common, between two creatures, one of whom is happy and the other in sorrow.
She at least observed this: that Clotilde, from an absolutely opposite point of view, was at one with Mme. de Blauve, with Mme. de Calouas, with La Villaumer, with each and every one, in saying to her: "My dear friend, you should not always mourn."
And her grief, so genuine, was increased tenfold.
But Clotilde, self-indulgent, egotistic, and thinking only of her own pleasure or of sparing herself pain, was saying to Odette:
"See here, my dear; will you do me a great service? Will you come to lunch with us to-morrow? Would that bore you?"
"Why should it bore me? Why do you call it doing you a service?"
"It is settled, then. See here; I must tell you a secret. You know how I love my husband, how happy I am. There is only one dark spot: my husband has a friend, a blinded officer—Captain Dessaud. He brings him two or three times a week to lunch, on the pretext that he is lonely, with no family, and desperate. Of course I cannot object, you understand; but the sight of that man is painful to me to a degree that you would never believe. I have to talk to him, and I have nothing to say to a fellow who has lost his sight, who hopes for nothing, who has no motive for being happy. I am sick with it. Come to my help—you are used to wretchedness, you know!"