Odette felt that she must know La Villaumer's opinion on this matter. They had no regular engagement for meeting, and met only by chance. She decided to go to his house shortly before the luncheon hour. An old servant ushered her into a room where, to her great surprise, she heard the tones of a harmonium mingled with a man's voice entirely untrained. It proceeded from the neighboring room, separated from her by a glass door partly screened by a curtain of Chinese silk. The thing was so unusual and so puzzling that she could not refrain from peeping around the edge of the curtain. She saw at the instrument an organist whom she knew, and standing beside him a man bereft of both arms, and the pose of whose head was that of a blind man trying to catch the notes which the teacher was patiently repeating. All around them were soldiers wearing black glasses, with closed eyes or with bandaged faces, and Villaumer in his dressing-gown coming and going among them. He suddenly disappeared and came into the room where Odette was standing.
"I have caught you!" said she. "Try now to convince me that what I have been told of you is not true! You are no longer in your own home!"
"My good friend," he replied, "I am having lessons given to the most unfortunate of those unhappy ones whom evil fortune and inaction are driving to despair. They are being taught the rudiments of music; they are trying to sing; it occupies them."
"I knew that you were kind——"
"I am not kind; I am generally severe upon men. But the sight of misfortune is intolerable to me; and for men like these, who have been three-quarters destroyed for the sake of saving us, yes, I confess that I could give my last shirt; I would wait upon them at table— Will you take luncheon with us?"
Through the half-open door into the dining-room she could see a table spread for twelve.
"Do you take lunch with them?" asked Odette.
"I permit myself that honor— It is my last self-indulgence. Well, will you take advantage of it?"
"I cannot, my friend, I cannot. I should weep through the whole meal. That is not what they need."
"No. One must have the courage to bestow upon them the gayety—which we don't possess. Social hypocrisy has not been practised all this time in vain, if it has taught this to some of us."