If she were a man, he was thinking, he'd pound some sensible judgments into her excited brain. Or was all this simply a nervous reaction from her mental struggles of the past months, from her final escape—a necessary play-acting?
He couldn't manage a word with her alone before dinner. The party wandered through grass-floored forest paths whose shy peace fled from the approach of uniforms and the heavy tramp of army boots. He resented her flood of public questions about his work, his prospects, his mental attitude toward the whole business. Her voice was too kind, her manner too sweet, with just the proper touch of sadness. She wasn't going to spare him anything of the soldier's due. Since he was being fattened, presumably for the butcher, she would turn his thoughts from the knife——
He longed for the riding crop in her fingers; he would have preferred its blows.
If he got her alone he would put a stop to such intolerable abuse, but the chance escaped him until long after dinner, when the moon swung high above the lake, when the men in uniform and their women were paired in the ballroom, or on the terrace and balconies. He asked her to dance at last and she made no difficulty, giving him that unreal and provoking smile.
"You dance well," she said when the music stopped.
They were near a door. He suggested that they go outside.
"While I tell you that if you offer me any more of that gruel I'll publicly accuse you of treason."
She looked at him puzzled, hesitating.
"What do you mean?"
"When it comes to being killed," he answered, "I prefer the Huns to empty kindness. It's rather more useful for the country, too. Please come out."