raised her high above herself. The great wave of motherliness that had
swept over all the women when the fatal hour struck for the men, had
borne her aloft, too. She had seen the three men with whom she was now
genially exchanging light nothings come to the hospital--like thousands
of others--streaming with blood, helpless, whimpering with pain. And
something of the joy of the hen whose brood has safely hatched warmed
her coquetry.

Since the men have been going for months, crouching, creeping on all
fours, starving, carrying their own death as mothers carry their
children; since suffering and waiting and the passive acceptance of
danger and pain have reversed the sexes, the women have felt strong, and
even in their sensuality there has been a little glimmer of the new
passion for mothering.

The melancholy wife, just arrived from a region in which the war exists
in conversation only, and engrossed in the one man to the exclusion of
the others, suffered from the sexless familiarity that they so freely
indulged in there in the shadow of death and agony. But the others were
at home in the war. They spoke its language, which in the men was a
mixture of obstinate greed for life and a paradoxical softness born of a
surfeit of brutality; while in the woman it was a peculiar, garrulous
cold-bloodedness. She had heard so much of blood and dying that her
endless curiosity gave the impression of hardness and hysterical
cruelty.

The Mussulman and the cavalry officer were chaffing the Philosopher and
poking fun at the phrase-mongers, hair-splitters, and other wasters of
time. They took a childish delight in his broad smile of embarrassment
at being teased in the Frau Major's presence, and she, out of feminine