“You abandoned everything to fight for your country?”
Under the spell of her dark eyes Doggie spoke according to Phineas after the going West of Taffy Jones, “I think, Mademoiselle Jeanne, it was rather to fight for my soul.”
She resumed her sewing. “That’s what I meant long ago,” she remarked with the first draw of the needle. “No one could fight for his soul without passing through suffering.” She went on sewing. Doggie, shrinking from a reply that might have sounded fatuous, remained silent; but he realized a wonderful faculty of comprehension in Jeanne.
After awhile he said: “Where did you learn all your wisdom, Mademoiselle Jeanne?”
“At the convent, I suppose. My father gave me a good education.”
“An English poet has said, ‘Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers’”—Doggie had rather a fight to express the meaning exactly in French—“You don’t gather wisdom in convents.”
“It is true. Since then I have seen many things.”
She stared across the room, not at Doggie, and he thought again of the ghosts.
“Tell me some of them, Mademoiselle Jeanne,” he said in a low voice.
She shot a swift glance at him and met his honest brown eyes.