But Elodie had fallen under the spell of Bakkus. Like him she loved talk, although her education allowed her only the lightest kind. She loved its give-and-take, its opportunities for the flash of wit or jest. Bakkus could talk about an old boot. She too. He could analyse sentiment in his mordant way. She could analyse it in her own unsophisticated fashion. Now Andrew, though death on facts and serious argument, remained dumb and bewildered in a passage-at-arms about apparently nothing at all; and while Bakkus and Elodie enjoyed themselves prodigiously, he gaped at them, wondering what the deuce they found to laugh at. He was for ever warning Elodie not to put a too literal interpretation on Bakkus's sayings.
The singer had gone grey, and that touch of venerability gave him an air of greater distinction, as a broken down tragedian, than he possessed when Andrew had first met him ten years or so before. Elodie could bandy jests with him, but when he spoke with authority she listened overawed.
"My dear André," she replied to his remark. "I am not a fool. I know when Horace is talking nonsense and when he means what he says."
"And I maintain," said Bakkus, "that this most adorable woman is being sacrificed on the altar of Cæsar's Commentaries and the latest French handbook on scientific slaughter."
"I think," said Andrew, who had imprudently sketched his course of reading to the cynic, "that The Art of War by Colonel Foch is the most masterly thing ever written on the subject of warfare."
"But who is going to war, these days, my good fellow?"
"They're at it now," said Andrew.
"The Balkans--Turkey--Bulgaria? Barbarians. What's that got to do with civilized England and France?"
"What about Germany?"
"Germany's never going to sacrifice her commercial position by going to war. Among great powers war is a lunatic anachronism."