This internal silent warfare between her long reed-like body as little
sensible to fatigue as if made of flexible steel and her extremely cold
proud chaste-looking head had grown to be of such absorbing interest that
the knowledge of its cessation was almost a shock. It was after a prolonged
experience in a hospital where they were short of nurses and rest was
almost unknown and the inroads upon her vitality so severe and menacing
that she was finally ordered to Paris to rest, and there found a complete
change of habit in an oeuvre founded by the equally exhausted but always
valiant Olive de Morsigny, that she suddenly realized that somewhere
sometime the battle had finished and mind and body were acting in complete
harmony.
VI
To-night she wondered if her imagination, turned loose, stimulated, had
not missed the whole point. There had been no man who had made the direct
irresistible appeal. No concrete temptation....She had after all been a
degree too civilized...or...romantic idealism?
There had been little to stimulate and excite since she had settled down to
office work in the summer of nineteen-sixteen. Her nerves, always strong,
had become too case-hardened to be affected by avions or the immense
uncertainties of Big Bertha; although the light on the horizon at night
during the last German Drive and the bellow of the guns had shaken her with
a sort of reminiscent excitement.
Pages:
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372