He talked quite gaily while they were at dinner in the long dining-hall under the minstrel's gallery.
But when they went to her little study afterwards together, they both were very silent.
There was a fire burning, but all the windows were open.
And as they sat there, almost silently together, they heard the first frogs singing in the castle moat. He laughed, and would have her tell him the story of the Frog Princess, that he never had cared for her to tell him when he was a little boy.
She knew that she would never listen to the frogs again without remembering that night.
She wondered if the memory would become an agony to her. It seemed to her strange that, caring so much, she could not know.
Under the walls of St. Germain des Prés, and the chestnut trees in their spring misty leaf of amber and topaz and ruby, a vendor of, I don't know what, had set up a little booth and shaded it with an indigo blue bit of canvas. The shade was deep purple under the blue canvas, and brass and bronze and copper and rust-red things had vague shapes in the shadow.
It was so beautiful that I was happy for all of a minute, passing in the tram on my way to the cantine.
They tell me that when they suffer I make little growling noises in my throat. They laugh and say, "Now the little Madame is angry!"
I am angry, I am furious. I am furious against suffering. I hate suffering.
If they scream I do not mind so much, but when they suffer silently, it is terrible.
Once the ward doctor thought I was going to cry.
I was holding the stump of a boy's leg while they dressed it. The leg had been cut off at the Front, hurriedly, anyhow, and the nerves left exposed.
The boy shuddered and quivered all over, and would not make a sound, and grew rigid with pain, stiff, and quite cold, and never made a sound.
The doctor, with the probe in his rubber-gloved hands, looked at me, and said, "You are going to cry! You must not cry before the wounded, it unnerves them."
And then I heard myself growling, with dreadful big words of the patronne's smothered under the growls.
And the little boy laughed out, through everything, just like a mischievous bad little boy.
To-day is so beautiful, many people must have been happy for a moment just in waking. It is so difficult not to be happy. It is such a wonderful thing to open one's blinds to a sunshiny May morning. And then there has to be the next moment.