All through the day the memory of Jean shook off from her the haunting thought of the three other dead men. She consulted a map of the Touring Club of which she had sometimes made use with her husband in their automobile drives. The spot where Jean had fallen was not far from a highway over which they had often driven. "Perhaps I saw one day the very spot where his body is lying to-day...." Then followed endless despairing reveries. How had she not foreseen the possibility of the event--of the war, at least? Yet war had often been discussed in her presence, at the time of the alarms of Agadir, of Casablanca, even of Tangier, when she was a young girl. Then things were possible, things which perhaps might happen to-morrow, of which people were talking to-day, and to which her mind had been hermetically closed? War, war! She used to know old people who talked about it; yes, because they had seen it. And they were tiresome. Young people didn't believe in such things. She tried to excuse herself; then she pronounced herself guilty. Why had they usually avoided people who talked of serious things? And why had they considered as clever those who ridiculed everything? Suddenly she thought of "Monsieur's linen," "Monsieur's wardrobe," of all those belongings of _his_ which would never again be used, never.... Should she go on leaving them all in their places? Should she do away with them? Or should she put them all away in a closet, a reliquary? She was at that point in her reflections when Amelia entered, in tears: "The son of the concierge, madame!" "Well, what?" "He too, madame!" Then the details; the unlucky fellow had been buried alive in an upheaval caused by a bomb, and had been dug out only too late. And Amelia began to talk of her husband, as if it had been he who was buried alive. When a few days passed without tidings of more deaths, all the women grew calm and began to hope. When a man whom they knew was killed, each one saw in him her husband, her father, her cousin, her son; all the men were wept for in advance in the person of the one who had fallen. If any one had said to these women: "But there are thousands falling every day, thousands!" they would have opened their eyes wide, only partly terrorized, for they had not yet become accustomed to the new condition of things. The one who should maintain that the war would not be over in a few weeks would be considered a bad patriot, or an ill-timed jester.