Yet the moment came when it seemed to her that she was losing her reason. She had seen many cases of cerebral disturbance since the war; they had been more or less apparent. Some persons of her acquaintance had been duly shut up in insane asylums, but there were many at large who showed the almost imperceptible wound by which the microbe had penetrated. By way of discovering whether or no she was mentally affected, she imposed upon herself the test of behaving for a while like a woman who has decided to lead the usual life until the end. She said to herself: "I am not insane, for I think it requires more courage to adopt, every day and every hour, the attitude of ordinary life, as if the war did not exist--seeing that the majority of people who act thus have been crushed or tortured by it--than to give oneself up to the monster bound hand and foot. I am the less strong in not being able to endure the commingling of both interests and throwing myself into these horrors. I should be senseless if I deemed my own actions alone to be good, beautiful, and worthy. But I am judging myself. I am therefore not demented." Out of curiosity she went one day to see Clotilde, still by way of test. "To measure myself," she said to herself. Clotilde's undue self-satisfaction made her friends really uncomfortable, a discomfort which from the first they had sought to hide or refused to recognize, which until now such a friend as Odette had even refused to admit, but which to-day she could not endure. Clotilde, surrounded by flowers, bathed in a perfumed atmosphere, talked only of a change she had made in the decoration of her rooms, of her clothes, or of matters so utterly foreign to current events that it seemed as if for her the latter had no existence. She never went out, lest she should be obliged to see or hear disagreeable things, and yet never had she bought so many hats and gowns as since the war. On her earlier visits Odette had slightly shrugged her shoulders as if amused and not wholly displeased. By degrees, the disproportion between such interests and the wound with which the whole world was bleeding overmastered her ability to make allowances. Odette reminded her friend that she had not of late called upon her for help, and asked if she had lost her blind man. Clotilde was amazingly frank in her reply: "My darling, 'my blind man,' as you call him, continues to exist and to charm my husband. But what would you have? It is not that I am lost to all sense of humanity, but you can imagine how the presence of this man annoys me. He cannot see me, I am nothing to him, and it is necessary for me to please----" "But one may please even those who don't see us. One can try to amuse these unfortunates, to make time pass pleasantly for them----" "You speak as if you possessed some gift in which I am lacking. It is only that you like them, and know how to please them----" "Oh!"