She ran down the wide staircase as rapidly as a woman in
fashionable skirts may. There was no British uniform in the hall below.
IV
She stood for a quarter of an hour under the arcade before the Crillon
waiting for a taxi, staring out into the dreary mist of rain, at the round
soft blurs of light in the Place de la Concorde, but in no wise depressed.
What did it matter if she had not met him to-day? The conviction that she
should meet him before long was as strong as if she were ever hopeful
sixteen....That was the real secret of her elation. She felt very young and
entirely carefree. She reflected that if she had met Gathbroke, or whoever
he might be, during the last three years of the war she would have felt
neither joy nor elation, however interested she might have been. To love
and dream and enjoy when men were falling every minute, writhing in agony,
gasping out their life, would have seemed to her grossly unaesthetic if
nothing worse. It was not in the picture. The primal impulses she had
experienced at the front to that harsh music of Death's orchestra were
natural enough; but safe (comparatively!) in Paris, certainly quiet, the
romance of love would have been as incongruous and heartless as to go out
to the great hospital at Neuilly and tango through a ward of dying men.
But now! She had done her part. She could do no more. Men still must die,
but in every comfort, with every consolation.
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