Odette never spoke of her husband's death, though she was always thinking of it. She had found neither officer nor soldier who had known him. The death of Lieutenant Jacquelin in the early days of the war was a disappearance like so many others, in a chain of events that had no common measure. A man would fall, another man would take his place; nearly all the officers by profession were dead, and there were officers still. "What is a man?" a common soldier asked her one day on the beach. X Early in the following spring, when the gardens that surrounded the villas of Surville were gay with flowering plums, and the countryside was again covered with those lovely trees of rosy snow that it is a pain to look at when men are killing one another, when the woods were venturing to confide to the brisk air their new-born foliage, Odette was obliged to make a visit to Paris. During the journey, in company with convalescents and men on furlough, old men, and women in mourning, she was astonished to find herself so much attached to the hospital which she had entered almost against her will, drawn by something which seemed not to belong to her real self. "Most of the women that I have met there," she reflected, "are of an unlovely pettiness, and one would say that they strive to transform the most innocent act into a shameful offense, from a desire to believe that there are traitors, guilty persons everywhere, and by a strange inclination to find the presence of the devil in every corner! And yet their service is excellent." Cunning malice, destructive backbiting, scandal set on foot by inconsiderate comments on trivial acts, often meaningless and that might well have been left unnoticed, open jealousy, absurd vanity, the most insidious intrigues to work up to distinction; to sum up, utter triviality--all these composed a body of customs recognized, admitted, in no respect casting a blot upon respectability. Only one thing led up to the mark of infamy: anything which nearly or remotely might resemble love. How surprising this had appeared in the eyes of a Parisian woman of twenty-seven, who had lived in the world of society during the years between 1905 and 1914! Odette mused upon that social circle, young, cheerful, given to sports, relatively kindly and prosperous, who before the war had surrounded her. What had become of Simone de Prans, Rose Misson, Clotilde Avvogade, Germaine Le Gault, and M. de La Villaumer? She had received brief missives from them, postal-cards rather than letters. On her part, had Odette perhaps disconcerted her friends by the accounts she sent them; had she perhaps wearied them by her persistent grief? Simone and Rose still had their husbands, the former grievously wounded, the other still whole, running about in his car as usual; Avvogade was attached to Great Headquarters. Can any one understand the sorrow from which he does not himself suffer?