Whence came these wounded men? From Ypres, from Arras, from Notre-Dame de Lorette. The names called up all that any one knew, through newspapers and private talk, of those charnel-houses whose image the imagination refuses to harbor, upon which those who have escaped from them keep silence. Odette, soapy brush in hand, forcing back all repugnance, doing as others did, was helping to soothe agonies which humanity seems never before to have known or dreamed of. The most shocking duties no longer repelled her. The very effort which she was compelled to make, by the contrast between what she was seeing and doing and what life had formerly offered her, pressed the character of the catastrophe to her mind which lacked capacity to conceive of it. "Is it, then, so great?" she would wonder. And even: "Is there after all anything great?" For no soul in the world had taught her this. The inevitable contrast with her past life, all for herself, for her individual satisfaction, seemed to dishonor her memories, even of happiness, making them almost trivial. This, indeed, was the opinion of Mme. de Calouas, but not that of Amelia, whom in her solitude it became sometimes necessary to oppose. "Madame adopts the ideas of those around her," the maid would say; "it is all very well, but Madame may believe me: the good time, and the true time, was before all this, when the poor men were not preparing to be made into hash." IX Who would have believed it a year ago? Odette took the inclination to follow to the cemetery the pitiful funerals of dead soldiers, not because it offered her a pretext for a walk into the country in the free air, for she had done that--she, so susceptible to cold--all through the black winter. But before everything else she was thinking that she had not followed her husband to the grave. After all that she had endured, still reverent of century-old rites, not to have followed the body of her husband in a funeral car to his last abode seemed to her to have failed in a sovereign duty. Alas! her husband's body had been carried in no funeral car, no one had followed him to the grave! She did not permit herself to dwell upon these heartrending details, but in accompanying the mortal remains of the soldiers she felt that she was to a certain degree acquitting herself of an indispensable duty that had not been rendered to Jean. Then the ceremony at the church moved her. The panoply of war mingling with hymns and words of peace, the tumult of battle set over against the sacerdotal acts of the priest, and the prayers for the eternal rest of the soul that had known to the uttermost the horror of earthly chaos, combined in some way to deaden the pain of mind, senses, and heart.