Years before, when she was but a little girl, she had stood by the bedside of her mother, dying for want of proper medical attention, the fees for which had been grudged until it was too late. Her mother had said: “Pray to the Virgin, now that you are alone!” She had answered, sobbing: “I will pray, and I will take care of father and brothers, and they of me!” “Pray to the Virgin!” the mother repeated. “She is the only one that will take care of you!” That unique effort of expression of a life worn down with toil, and given up to save expense, had sunk into Madeleine’s mind, been confirmed by the teaching of the convent school, where the nuns seemed to be perpetually clearing up the mess men made of things. When the war came Madeleine dumbly recognized it for a thing that men did. She had none of the definite sex-antagonism of an English suffragist, was affectionately tolerant of her father and brothers, and constructively tender to Georges, would have loved to have surrounded him with perpetual comfort and indulgence. But in the bulk, men were always doing things like this war. Her smouldering, almost sulky resentment had not decreased one particle during the fifteen months that had passed. For her, the day of mobilization had been catastrophic. Georges, grandson of an ennobled “industrialist” and of bourgeois blood of the official classes, surprised everybody, surprised Madeleine, surprised perhaps himself. The manifesto “La Patrie est en danger” had just been issued. He seemed to have swallowed its sentiments whole. His papers arrived, and found him in uniform--he was (of course) in the cuirassiers. He mounted and rode off. Like so many others, the indolent, expensive young man lost all thought of anything except what he deemed “duty.” Madeleine, who knew as well as anyone that his depot would be at Lille, had taken her stand, that August morning, just inside the gate of the Kruysabel. She had chosen that place for easy concealment, and she knew he must pass that way; she was prepared to give him anything he might want. He passed her at the trot, looking rather fine in his regimentals, and well mounted. He raised his hand to the salute, but did not draw rein. She had gone home and taken up her work where she had laid it down.