She hesitated before answering, but finally nodded her head…. She had been in Paris many times. The outbreak of the war had found her living in the Grand Hotel. Fortunately, two days before the rupture of hostilities, she had received news enabling her to avoid being made prisoner in a concentration camp…. And she did not wish to say more. She was verbose and frank in the relation of her far-distant experiences, but the memory of the more recent ones enshrouded her in a restless and frightened reserve.
To change the course of conversation, she spoke of the dangers that had threatened her on her journeys.
"We have to be very courageous…. The doctor, just as you see her, is a heroine…. You laugh, but if you should know her arsenal, perhaps it might strike fear to your heart. She is a scientist."
The grave lady had an invincible repugnance for vulgar weapons, and Freya referred freely to a portable medicine case full of anesthetics and poisons.
"Besides this she carries on her person a little bag full of certain powders of her own invention,—tobacco, red pepper…. Perfect little devils! Whoever gets them in the eyes is blinded for life. It is as though she were throwing flames."
She herself was less complicated in her measures of defense. She had her revolver, a species of firearms which she managed to keep hidden just as certain insects hide their sting, without knowing certainly when it might be necessary to draw it forth. And if she could not avail herself of that, she always relied on her hatpin.
"Just look at it!… With what gusto I could pierce the heart of many a person!…"
And she showed him a kind of hidden poniard, a keen, triangular stiletto of genuine steel, capped by a large glass pearl that served as its hilt.
"Among what kind of people are you living!" murmured the practical voice in Ferragut's interior. "What have you mixed yourself up with, my son!" But his tendency to discount danger, not to live like other people, made him find a deep enchantment in this novel-like existence.
The doctor no longer went on excursions, but her visitors were increasing in number. Sometimes, when Ulysses was starting toward her room, Freya would stop him.