It became difficult for Belinda to bring into her ward a cheerful face, as had been her wont, to speak lightly to her charges, to raise—as she had heretofore—the spiritual temperature.
Desultory fighting continued; but after all there had been no great push. It was abandoned, they said, till spring. Snow and mud, rain and frost, made of all Northern France where the trenches lay an almost impassable wilderness. Nature and the elements gave the embattled armies a respite from the fray.
That is, these circumstances made all but ordinary trench fighting and air activities impossible. There were sorties and counter attacks along the sector almost daily; but the general result was nil for either side.
The Red Cross nurse went back to Minerva's one evening under a lowering sky that was copper colored by the rays of the setting sun all along the horizon. The landscape, Belinda thought, was the dreariest she had ever seen. Here and there stood tortured, broken trees, where shells had burst in the branches. Everywhere in the fields were marmite holes, or the craters made by the shells from the "Big Berthas." Many of the houses along the way had been burst asunder by the shells, and, of course, had never been repaired.
In her room under the now-thatched eaves of the stone-walled cottage Belinda delayed undressing, not because her body was not wearied, but because her brain was wide, wide awake. In the dull radiance of a smoky lamp she read over again the few letters from Aunt Roberta and from girls whom she had known in New York or at college that had reached her since she had come to the battlefields.
There was a cheerful note in all—even in Aunt Roberta's.
"Captain Dexter has called again and reports that you are very well and as pretty as ever. Ah, he is a dear man. He knows how to compliment a woman. He should be French," was the burden of Aunt Roberta's last letter.
"He calls in the morning in a taxicab and takes me to drive, if I have time to go. In the afternoon he sometimes takes tea with me. That is, if I and Margot are not housecleaning. Such a house as this is for dirt! And Margot must be watched like a hawk or she will sweep the sweepings under the furniture. If all goes well the captain sometimes takes me to dinner. The cafés and restaurants are not very gay, I must confess. It is very different now from my remembrance of Paris as it used to be. Why, it is not even as gay as New York! And these landlords here evidently never heard of hot-water supply! All I get through the rusty registers in these rooms, too, is the smell of coal gas—no heat, I vow! I know why the nobles who once lived in this hotel are here no more; they all froze to death in the cold winter of '74—and the present winter promises to be even colder. I have set up a coal stove in the parlor, as the tradesmen seem to know nothing about oil heaters. The captain says he would like to have the opportunity of putting his feet up on a base-burner (whatever that may be) and of eating a baked apple at night before he retires, as he used to do in Old Saybrook. That Old Saybrook must, in truth, be a place very charming."