"Really? Somehow I don't feel that I deserve it."
"Deserve what?"
"All that you are giving me. But I have liked to think of it. It has been a prop to lean on—"
"Only that—?"
"A shield and a buckler, dearest, a cross held high—" Her breath came quickly.
* * * * * *
They sat side by side on the worn doorstep of a shattered building and talked.
"I am in a shack—a baraque,—they call it," Drusilla told him, "with three other women. We have fixed up one room a little better than the others, and whenever the men come through the town some of them drift in and are warmed by our fire, and I sing to them; they call me 'The Singing Woman.'"
She did not tell him how she had mothered the lads. She was not much older than some of them, but they had instinctively recognized the maternal quality of her interest in them. With all her beauty they had turned to her for that which was in a sense spiritual.
Hating the war, Drusilla yet loved the work she had to do. There was, of course, the horror of it, but there was, too, the stimulus of living in a world of realities. She wondered if she were the same girl who had burned her red candles and had served her little suppers, safe and sound and far away from the stress of fighting.