"He asked me to bring him a rose. He said the smell of roses was so sweet and he felt so faint. I brought him the rose--and he was dead!"
"Yes, yes!" Marta breathed. She, too, in her quick imagination, was seeing the young private and spatters of blood on the terrace. Lanstron feasted his eyes on her face, which mirrored her emotion.
"Oh, the groans of the dying in the night and the cheering when the news of victory came in!" Mrs. Galland continued. "I could not cheer. But that was, long, long ago--long ago, and yet only yesterday! And now we are to have it all over again. The young men must have their turn. They will not be satisfied by the experience of their fathers. Yes, all over again; still more horrible--and it was horrible enough then! I used to get giddy easily. I do yet. But I didn't faint--no, not once through the days of nursing, the weeks of suspense. I wondered afterward how I could have endured so much."
"Are we of the septicized-serum age equal to it?" Marta exclaimed.
"Yes, we of the matter-of-fact, automatic gun-recoil age!" put in Lanstron.
"Oh, mother," Marta went on, "I wish you would go with me to the class some morning, you who have seen and felt war, and tell it all as you saw it to the children!"
"But," remonstrated Mrs. Galland, "I'm an old-fashioned woman; and, Marta, your father was an officer, as your grandfather was, too. I am sure he would not approve of your school, and I could do nothing against his wishes."
She looked up with moistening eyes to a portrait on the opposite wall over the seat which her husband had occupied at table. Lanstron saw there a florid, jaunty gentleman in riding-habit, gloves on knee, crop in hand. The spirit of the first Galland or of the stern grandfather on the side wall--with Blücher tufts in front of his ears sturdy defiance of that parvenu Bonaparte and of his own younger brother who had fallen fighting for Bonaparte--would have frowned on the descendant who had filled the house with many guests and paid the bills with mortgages in the ebbing tide of the family fortunes. But Mrs. Galland saw only a hero. She shared his prejudices against the manufacturers of the town; she saw the sale of land to be cut up into dwelling sites, which had saved the Gallands from bankruptcy, as the working of the adverse fate of modern tendencies. Even as she had left all details of business to her husband, so she had of late left them to Marta's managing.