“When your wife dies, and we’re married; then I shall rest—not before!”
He moved restlessly and bit his lip. She went on:
“Do you think I didn’t see you playing the gallant with Madame de Roux? Don’t protest! I’ve eyes in the middle of my back,” she said, quivering, “for every petticoat that comes near you. Don’t I know your charming ways with women, poor idiots that we are!”
“Laura!” he muttered, as her ringed hand clenched upon his chair-arm, and her fever-bright eyes shot challenges at him. “For Heaven’s sake don’t make me a scene of jealousy!”
“All right! Tell me what you thought when the Brigade got fairly in movement. Was it anything about me?”
“By Gad! no!” he said, wounding her unintentionally. “What I thought to myself was: ‘Here goes the last of the Paradynes!’”
“Trot! Canter! Gallop! Charge!” She imitated the staccato tones of the officer commanding. “Why wasn’t I born a man, so that I might have followed you—and fought for you—and died for you when I got my chance! There! Lady Granbyson is beckoning to me.... I’m compromising myself hopelessly, sitting here with you like Darby and Joan....”
She flashed a disdainful eye-dart at Lady Granbyson, a portly dowager in voluminous cinnamon satin, fluttering in distress afar off, like a large maternal hen. Then she rose, and stooped over him, clasping the wrist of the unwounded arm that he had thrown across the chair-back, and whispered, with her blazing eyes looking into his, as her burning breath beat upon his cheek, and a long, snaky ringlet of her hot-colored golden hair trailed across the tarnished Brandenbourgs of his Hussar jacket:
“Do you know what I would have done if the last of the Paradynes had gone that way? Drowned myself in the Bosphorus when the news came from the Front!”...
He flushed crimson to the temples and caught his breath.