"The best of life is not to know what will happen next."

"Ah, that was so extraordinary coming from a woman that you must
pardon me for listening and making exclamation," came an answer in a
nice voice near at my elbow. The words were spoken in as perfect
English as I had learned from my father, but in them I observed to be
an intonation that my French ear detected as Parisian. "Also,
Mademoiselle, are you young women of the new era to be without that
very delightful but often danger-creating quality of curiosity?" As I
turned I looked with startled eyes into the grave face of a man less
than forty years, whose sad eyes were for the moment lighting with a
great tenderness which I did not understand.

"I believe the quality which will be most required of the women of the
era which is mine, is--is courage and then more courage, Monsieur," I
made answer to him as if I had been discussing some question with him
in my father's smoking room at the Chateau de Grez, as I often came in
to do with my father and his friends after the death of my mother when
the evenings seemed too long alone. They had liked that I so came at
times, and the old Count de Breaux once had remarked that feminine
sympathy was the flux with which men made solid their minds into a
unanimous purpose. He had been speaking of that war a few weeks after
Louvaine and I had risen and had stood very tall and very haughty
before him and my father.

"The women of France are to come after this carnage to mold a nation
from what remains to them, Monsieur," I had said to him as I looked
straight into his face. "Is not the courage of women a war supply upon
which to rely?"