He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered her horse and let him go, and he plunged ahead so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie Louise from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the pommel of his own, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled. She was so rumpled and so furious, and he so frightened, that he left her and spurred after her horse, brought him back, and bothered her no more that day. "If you ever annoy me again," she said, "it'll be the last you'll see of me." She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she had him cowed. It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged to love Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in his behalf. There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation. There is something froward about the passion. It hangs back like a fretful child, loathing what is held out for its temptation, longing for the forbidden, the sharp, the perilous. Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest impediment. Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought to marry Nicky, and herself kept refusing to obey. From very perversity her heart turned to other interests. She was desperately in love with soldiers _en masse_ and individually. There was safety in numbers and a canceling rivalry between those who were going out perhaps to death and those who had come back from the jaws of death variously the worse for the experience. The blind would have been irresistible in their groping need of comfort, if there had not been the maimed of body or mind putting out their incessant pleas for a gramercy of love. Those whose wounds were hideous took on an uncanny beauty from their sacrifice. She busied herself about them and suffered ecstasies of pity. She wanted to go to France and get near to danger, to help the freshly wounded, to stanch the spouting arteries, to lend courage to the souls dismayed by the first horror of the understanding that thenceforth they must go through life piecemeal. But whenever she made application she met some vague rebuff. Her appeals were passed on and on and the blame for their failure was referred always to some remote personage impossible to reach. Eventually it dawned on her that there was actually an official intention to keep her out of France. This stupefied her for a time. One day it came over her that she was herself suspect. This seemed ridiculous beyond words in view of her abhorrence of the German cause in large and in detail. Ransacking her soul for an explanation, she ran upon the idea that it was because of her association with the Weblings.