“Brave!” said the General, with a touch of irony.  “So she said,” answered Madame Delicieuse, “and I asked her, ‘how brave?’ ‘Brave?’ she said, ’why, braver than any soldier, in tending the small-pox, the cholera, the fevers, and all those horrible things.  Me, I saw his father once run from a snake; I think he wouldn’t fight the small-pox—­my faith!’ she said, ’they say that Dr. Mossy does all that and never wears a scapula!—­and does it nine hundred and ninety-nine times in a thousand for nothing! Is that brave, Madame Delicieuse, or is it not?’—­And, General,—­what could I say?”

Madame dropped her palms on either side of her spreading robes and waited pleadingly for an answer.  There was no sound but the drumming of the General’s fingers on his sword-hilt.  Madame resumed: 

“I said, ’I do not deny that Mossy is a noble gentleman;’—­I had to say that, had I not, General?”

“Certainly, Madame,” said the General, “my son is a gentleman, yes.”

“‘But,’ I said, ‘he should not make Monsieur, his father, angry.’”

“True,” said the General, eagerly.

“But that lady said:  ‘Monsieur, his father, makes himself angry,’ she said.  ‘Do you know, Madame, why his father is angry so long?’ Another lady says, ‘I know!’ ‘For what?’ said I.  ’Because he refused to become a soldier; mamma told me that.’  ‘It cannot be!’ I said.”

The General flushed.  Madame saw it, but relentlessly continued: 

“‘Mais oui,’ said that lady.  ‘What!’ I said, ’think you General Villivicencio will not rather be the very man most certain to respect a son who has the courage to be his own master?  Oh, what does he want with a poor fool of a son who will do only as he says?  You think he will love him less for healing instead of killing?  Mesdemoiselles, you do not know that noble soldier!’”

The noble soldier glowed, and bowed his acknowledgments in a dubious, half remonstrative way, as if Madame might be producing material for her next confession, as, indeed, she diligently was doing; but she went straight on once more, as a surgeon would.

“But that other lady said:  ’No, Madame, no, ladies, but I am going to tell you why Monsieur, the General, is angry with his son.’  ’Very well, why?’—­’Why?  It is just—­because—­he is—­a little man!’”

General Villivicencio stood straight up.

“Ah! mon ami,” cried the lady, rising excitedly, “I have wounded you and made you angry, with my silly revelations.  Pardon me, my friend.  Those were foolish girls, and, anyhow, they admired you.  They said you looked glorious—­grand—­at the head of the procession.”

Now, all at once, the General felt the tremendous fatigues of the day; there was a wild, swimming, whirling sensation in his head that forced him to let his eyelids sink down; yet, just there, in the midst of his painful bewilderment, he realized with ecstatic complacency that the most martial-looking man in Louisiana was standing in his spurs with the hand of Louisiana’s queenliest woman laid tenderly on his arm.