"I scarcely thought that we should ever meet under these conditions," he said slightly constrained, a touch of color in his cheeks.
She had no excuse for her reply unless, in truth, she were in training for the town scold. But he typified an idea. He gave to war the aspect of refinement.
"If you did not expect it, why did you enter the army?" she asked.
He saw that she was not quite herself. The strain of the day had unnerved her. Yet he answered her bootless question with simple directness.
"I liked the idea of being a soldier. I was reared in the atmosphere of the army, and I hoped that I might do my duty if war came."
Perhaps this was point one for him. Marta shrugged her shoulders.
"I might have guessed beforehand what you would say," she replied. "You sent for me?"
"Hardly that, please. I asked if I might see you. The captain of engineers tells me that you insist on staying and I came to beg you to keep in the back of the house. You will be safe there. Any shell that may enter will explode in the front rooms and the fragments will not go through the second wall."
"Yes, we understand that. We have already removed our heirlooms," she replied indifferently.
The fatalism of her attitude and his alarm lest she had gone a little out of her head aroused all the innate horror of a man at the thought of a woman under fire. He broke out desperately:
"Miss Galland, this is no place for you! You do not realize--"
He had made the same mistake as the captain of engineers--touched a spot of irritation as raw as it had been in the morning.
"Why shouldn't I stay here? Why shouldn't every wife and mother be here in the fire zone? You soldiers die--it is very easy to die--and leave us to suffer. You destroy and leave us to build up. You go on a debauch of killing and come home to the women to nurse you. Why make us suffer the consequences without sharing the glory of the deed?"
Such reasoning was not in the province of his training. He feared that she was about to become hysterical.
"Really, Miss Galland, I--women and children--I--" he was stammering.
"Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder."