Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest impediment. Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought to marry Nicky, and herself kept refusing to obey.
From very perversity her heart turned to other interests. She was desperately in love with soldiers en masse and individually. There was safety in numbers and a canceling rivalry between those who were going out perhaps to death and those who had come back from the jaws of death variously the worse for the experience.
The blind would have been irresistible in their groping need of comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body or mind putting out their incessant pleas for a gramercy of love. Those whose wounds were hideous took on an uncanny beauty from their sacrifice.
She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of pity.
She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help the freshly wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend courage to the souls dismayed by the first horror of the understanding that thenceforth they must go through life piecemeal.
But whenever she made application she met some vague rebuff. Her appeals were passed on and on and the blame for their failure was referred always to some remote personage impossible to reach.
Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an official intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied her for a time. One day it came over her that she was herself suspect. This seemed ridiculous beyond words in view of her abhorrence of the German cause in large and in detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she ran upon the idea that it was because of her association with the Weblings.
She was ashamed to have given such a thought passage through her mind. But it came back as often as she drove 31 it out and then the thought began to hover about her that perhaps the suspicion was not so insane as she believed. The public is generally unreasonable, but its intuitions, like a woman’s, are the resultants of such complex instincts that they are above analysis.
But the note-carrying went on, and she could not escape from the suspicion or its shadow of disgrace. Like a hateful buzzard it was always somewhere in her sky.
Once the suspicion had domiciled itself in her world, it was incessantly confirmed by the minutiæ of every-day existence. The interchange of messages with Nicky Easton grew unexplainable on any other ground. The theory of secret financial dealings looked ludicrous; or if the dealings were financial, they must be some of the trading with the enemy that was so much discussed in the papers.