"Doesn't he grow handsome? And yet the dear fellow is overworking. It isn't a sinecure, I assure you, his position at General Headquarters! But I feel sure that I amuse him; I divert him from his worries. Without flattering myself I please him, these days. And I love him, Oh, how I love him!" "You are two lucky people." "Forgive me, dear Odette, I am almost ashamed to dwell upon my happiness before you. But you are the only person who understands; you, who have truly loved." "Who love still, Clotilde." Clotilde opened her eyes wide, thinking that she had not heard aright. She knew what love was, surely, but it was difficult for her to admit that after two years and a half one could love a dead man, as she loved her strong and handsome husband. Yet she certainly could entertain no suspicion concerning Odette, and she at once resolved to make the most of her friend's enduring sentiments to talk to her about her own personal love. She overwhelmed her with it as with a flood. Her love had reached an intensity which it had never known in times of peace. The seclusion which she had chosen in order to avoid hearing any talk of war had built around her an ivory tower; and no longer meeting any one but her husband, her pleasures ministered to only by him, she had found him taking a place of unusual importance in her life; in himself he embodied all the delights of which the war had deprived her, and which she had learned to forget. Odette herself began to speak of love. The subject was painful to her, and yet she enjoyed it. Clotilde was the only creature with whom, since the war, she had been able to converse on the subject without diffidence. Letting herself go along the lines of her memories and her habitual reveries, she began to taste the joy of a prisoner shut up in a dark cell, who finds an opportunity to mention the brook that flows through the sun-bathed field below his father's house. "After all," she concluded, "the things that we have been saying, if they could be noted down, would interest the world more, fifty or a hundred years hence, than all the terrible events that are taking place." Clotilde would hear nothing about "terrible events." Love alone was worth considering. "We meet love everywhere," said Odette. "I find it springing up under my feet wherever I go; in the operating-room, at the bedside of the wounded and the dying. The towns nearest to the front are fuller of it than any others, it would seem. They say that it has never caused such a stir." "It represents life, which must be perpetuated, whatever happens. In your case, my dear Odette, love is joined to death, but in general, no; it severs itself from death. Those of our day who sing of love and practise it are more surely serving the future than those who conceive of restraint as the sole virtue."