Madame Koelen bit into Maddy’s curls. It was quite evident she meant to know life. She had got her chance at last, and would not let it escape.
“I do not think,” said the unhappy hostess, firing her final shot, “that your husband would approve.”
The wife wheeled with a sudden savage movement, not unlike that of a snake about to strike.
“_Ah, voilà qui m’est bien égal!_ That is my own affair!”
There was nothing more to be said. We wondered whether the Garde Civique had ever had such a glimpse of the real Geneviève Koelen as had just been revealed to us. Even to us it was startling.
An extraordinary hot afternoon it turned out. The sun was too blazing for us to venture beyond the shadow of the house. We sat on the terrace, and Madame Koelen wandered restlessly up and down, biting at a rose. The master of the Villino suddenly appeared among us, all smiles.
“A telegram for you, Madame. I have just taken it down on the telephone. It is from your husband. He is coming here to-day.”
He was very glad; it was the burden of responsibility lifted. Not so, however, Madame Koelen.
She snapped the sheet of paper and walked away, conning it over.
The garden was humming with heat. The close-packed heliotrope beds in the Dutch garden under the library window were sending up gushes of fragrance. In the rose-beds opposite, the roses--“General MacArthur,” “Grüss aus Teplitz,” “Ulrich Brunner,” “Barbarossa” (we hope these friendly aliens will soon be completely degermanized), crimson carmine, velvet scarlet, glorious purple--seemed to be rimmed with gold in the sun-blaze. It was a faultless sky that arched our world, and the moor, already turning from silver amethyst to the ardent copper of the burnt heather, rolled up towards it, like a sleeping giant wrapped in robes of state.
On such a day the inhabitants of the Villino would, in normal times, have found life very well worth living indeed; basking in the sun and just breathing in sweetness, warmth, colour--aspiring beauty, if this can be called living! But in war time the subconsciousness of calamity is ever present. Inchoate apprehension of bad news from the front is massed at the back of one’s soul’s horizon, so that one lives, as it were, under the perpetual menace of the storm.