...
It is hard to be a woman, full of the stormy impulse to personal
devotion, and to have to be impersonal, abstract, exact, punctual. She
must control herself....
She gave herself up to fantastic dreams, dreams of the days when the war
would be over and victory enthroned. Then perhaps this harshness,
this armour would be put aside and the gods might unbend. Her eyelids
drooped....
She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night outside
was no longer still. That there was an excitement down below on the
bridge and a running in the street and a flickering of searchlights
among the clouds from some high place away beyond the Trocadero. And
then the excitement came surging up past her and invaded the hall
within.
One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of the
room, gesticulating and shouting something.
And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't
understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed machinery and
cables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses beat. And about her
blew something like a wind--a wind that was dismay.
Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might
look towards its mother.
He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that
was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly
gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too manifestly
disposed to drag him towards the great door that opened on the terrace.
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