"No, Odette, you don't consider that everything is changed." "One's heart, too?" "Yes, one's heart, too. Many among us pass for hard-hearted and inhuman, but everything now appears from another point of view." "Love is always love." Odette, whose sense of hearing was extremely acute, overheard a low-voiced conversation in which Simone was saying how well her dear Pierrot was looking, and she swooned again. The rest of the day was only one lamentation, an inarticulate and continuous moaning. The following days were no better. The physician dreaded meningitis. Human beings are often weak in the face of great catastrophes when they are governed only by their natural sentiments. Yet Rose, who was in all things natural, remained completely devoted to Odette. "It is easier," said Mme. de Blauve, "to nurse a gravely wounded man than a woman distracted with grief, for whom there is nothing to do, to whom there is nothing to say." The first two days of Odette's grief were as nothing in comparison with those that followed. She uttered no sound except to moan; she fell into delirious slumbers, had hours of furious insomnia, nightmares, hallucinations, attacks of hysterics. At last came the period of confidences, with torrents of tears. Among Odette's friends, some had not been pleased because they had not been admitted to her room the first day; others were forgetting everything in their dominant desire to obtain a place as nurse in a hospital. Some of these, having succeeded in compassing their wishes, came at last, and were not denied entrance to the sick-room, by reason of the costume that they wore. At first it seemed as if they might harm Odette by the lamentable scenes which they described. These nurses delighted in employing new, technical words, which they had taken pains to learn by heart, like so many schoolgirls. But Odette would murmur: "All your unhappy ones, with their surgical operations--they are alive, after all." And she would think to herself: "Mine is dead." What answer could be made to that? Odette received heaps of letters, whose eloquence overwhelmed without touching her. She deemed all their expressions exaggerated, and yet she could not say that they rang false; they spoke of France, of glory and honor; hardly did they make allusion to her love, which to her was all.