She was beginning to get up, to come and go about her apartment. It made things worse. Every place, every article, reminded her of Jean. He used to sit in that chair; he had loved to play with that little ornament. Before his photographs, in the drawing-room, she succumbed once more. Here he was in tennis-costume, so graceful, so lithe, so beautiful; there in house dress, that velvet jacket that she had so often encircled with her arms. She would walk through the rooms trying to breathe the faint odors of a perfume which he might have left there. She would sink down upon the divan where once there had been room for him.... And she started with a sudden thrill when the shadow of Amelia formed a halo-surrounded image against the fixed curtain of the glass door. In the old days, when he came in, a great shadow would spread thus behind the yellow silk, and suddenly his tall form would rise above the curtain, and his kind smile would appear through the glass.... Then she would listen for the sound of a key in the door. No one would ever again enter that door by means of a key.... As she was opening, in a drawer, the box of his favorite cigars and would fain have lost herself in the odor which brought before her the image of her man, a telegram was brought to her. She tore it open mechanically, all news being indifferent to her. It was from Mlle. de Blauve, a girl of fourteen, and announced that her father, Commandant de Blauve, had died upon the field of honor. Her mother had been for the last few days a nurse at Rheims, her natal city, under bombardment. The three little De Blauve girls were alone at home with the governess, the two older brothers being in Jersey at school. For the first time since her bereavement Odette was obliged to think of others. She closed the box of cigars, and thought of that house in the Avenue d'Iena that she knew so well, of those charming little girls, henceforth orphaned, the eldest of whom was so calmly acquitting herself of the duties of courtesy. "I must go there," she said, and called her maid to dress her. Her mourning dress had been brought home the day before yesterday, but she had not so much as tried it on. Now for the first time she put on her clothes without a thought of her appearance. She took a carriage and went to the Avenue d'Iena. III She was expecting to find consternation in a family crushed by their fate, and during the drive she reflected with astonishment that it was not altogether painful to her to visit people in grief; in her inmost heart she would rather meet the little de Blauve girls mourning, unhappy, than her consolatory friends, overflowing with kind and beautiful words, but not personally sorrowing. "It is not the sight of happiness that consoles us in our sorrows," she said to herself, "but to come into touch with a grief that is like our own."