"Oh yes, I see. Dear me! how hard he blows his nose! Your colonel has a cold: one can hear him from here—ha! ha!"
"There is nothing strange in his having a cold: he has just come from Africa: see how tanned he is. Well, my dear, he is a lion."
"Then he is an attaché?"
"Oh, how stupid you are! I said he is a lion because he fought like a tiger, and he—"
"Then say he is a tiger, and have done with it."
—(Shrugging her shoulders) "and that at the battle of Rapata—Ratapa—or Patara—I can't remember exactly what, but it was a frightful battle—where the Arabs bit the dust—That's it, word for word, as papa read it aloud the other day out of the paper."
"Why did they bite the dust?"
"Why, because they were so angry. You know when you are in a passion—Well, in this battle the colonel received a cannon-ball or bullet—I don't remember which—in his left shoulder, and they could not extract it, so he returned to France very ill."
"How terrible those battles must be!"
"It is the day after a battle that is terrible. Just think of it! They found this poor colonel under a mountain of dead men at the very moment the wild beasts were going to devour him like the missionary in the Propagation of the Faith. Being swallowed by a crocodile is indeed terrible."