“What is the grain of fact?”
“Why, the great scale offensive.”
“And where’s the rest of the rumour incorrect?”
“I don’t think I ought to tell you.”
“But don’t you see how important it is that a woman in my position, and a woman of my character, should know exactly? Half the calamities of the war are due to women giving away half secrets of which they’re not allowed to realize the consequences. Give a woman full confidence, and she’ll be on the side of the angels.”
He kissed her and laughed. Was she not one of the angelic band herself?
She pleaded subtly, her head on his shoulder, her deep-blue eyes looking up into his, her breath on his cheek. Surely he and she were one. One heart, one mind, one soul. Individually each was the other’s complement. He could work out vast schemes—the most junior of Third Grade Staff Officers glowed at the flattery—and she could see, not that they were put into execution, but that wicked and irresponsible gossip should not bring them to naught. In her woman’s wheedling she had no ulterior purpose in view. She was not the political adventuress unscrupulously seducing enamoured youth to the betrayal of his country. It was all insatiable curiosity and lust for secret power. And, as far as lay in her nature, she loved the boy; she loved him with a sense of possession; she craved him wholly, his devotion, his mind, his knowledge. His physical self was hers, at a moment’s call. She played with that certainty in delicious trepidation. It invested their relationship in a glamour unknown, mysterious, in spite of her married estate. But the long-atrophied romantic in her sprang to sudden life and prevailed.
So subtly did she plead that he was unaware of her overmastering desire. Secure in her love and her loyalty, and confident in the twin hearts and souls, he told her what he knew; but the numerical and topographical details, proving too confusing for her, he laughed and went over to his desk and, with her sitting over him on the arm of his writing-chair, sketched a map annotated with facts and figures on a sheet of notepaper. When he had done, she returned to the sofa and read the notes.
“Now I understand everything. It’s tremendously exciting, isn’t it?”
“If it comes off.”