EITHER of them had a single illusion left. General Eustace St. Clair Montrose was over fifty, and had spent his full, single-minded, and battered life in getting his own way. On the whole, he had succeeded in getting it, but he had not got anything else.
Madame Léonie Nibaud had left forty markedly behind her, and her accumulations (she had been occupied in laying up treasure for herself) had not been arranged principally with a view to heaven.
They measured the attraction which drew them together with the infallibility of repeated experience. Sex had no secrets from them, and no continuities; nevertheless, it was for both the principal diversion.
General Montrose was a tall, handsome man, with thick gray hair and eyebrows, dancing blue eyes, and a mouth like a steel trap. He had a massive chin, which he thrust out a little in argument. From his earliest youth he had fought and enjoyed fighting. All concessions that came to him without a struggle he regarded in the light of grievances. Conquest was his goal, but he always despised those who let him get there. His character was of the same consistency as a perfectly made cricket-ball, hard, light, and capable of rebounding. It was not capable of any other flexibility. He had a great many hearty tastes, but those for women, food, and flowers were predominant.
General Montrose had married young, and had alienated both his children. His wife died after a few subdued years of unequal and, on the general's part, unobservant companionship. He had been strictly faithful to his marriage tie, and nourished an obscure resentment against it in consequence of this privation. He had, however, made up for it since.
Léonie Nibaud was less simple a spirit. There was the strain of the artist in her, but of the artist suppressed and supplanted. She had had a voice, which was a small fortune, and beauty, which was a greater one, and being a strictly practical woman, she had given up the lesser for the greater. Her experiences comprised a husband, whom she had without difficulty or hostility divorced; a fortune that permitted her seclusion to take the form of expensive hotels; and a daughter of twenty whom she had brought up in the purity ascribed to lilies. Mme. Nibaud herself, if not wholly respectable, was quite sufficiently respected.
Léonie's masseuse, her coiffeur, and her dressmaker were more intimate with her, and more necessary to her existence, than any other persons. The general's eyes, as they traveled unceasingly over her presented appearance, told of their combined success without being aware of the extent of their influence.
Léonie was not slim, and it would have been better for her to have eaten fewer chocolates. But if her complexion was an art and her figure an increasing problem, her features were a gift of nature, and her great, provocative brown eyes, with their deep fringe of lashes, might have been thrust upon her direct from the hand of the least conscientious of the goddesses.
She used these organs without haste and without rest. They shut off from the general all the distractions of the great, light room, full of flowered tables and the delicate April sunshine of Paris—the room through which, during those black and crumbling years, all that France knew of pleasure. ran uninterruptedly and clear, with no apparent regret for the abbreviated careers of its seekers.
Léonie noticed that during the third spring the class of men had deteriorated: there were fewer young and handsome specimens. In that unending procession, the men that passed and passed, but never came again, were either, as the man before her, of high rank and mature years, or they were weedy and belated types, and they were all more dissolute. Leaves had ceased to be joyous and hopeful interludes in a soon-to-be-triumphant business. The interludes had become feverish reactions of panic against the oncoming certainty of horror and death. Those whom the gods loved had already received their final favor.
Léonie did not allow herself to dwell upon these disagreeable and vicarious sacrifices; but she noticed, because she was there to notice, the thinning down of quality.
Léonie was the first Frenchwoman the general had met who did not say the war was terrible or ask him when it was going to end. Nor did she put the responsibility of the next great push upon his shoulders. She refrained from any mention of the war, and when the general complimented her upon this conversational omission, L6onie shrugged her shoulders lightly.
"I am like that," she agreed, "to what does not concern me. I cannot alter the conditions of war, and as they do not involve me, they are for me the mountains in the moon."