through.  Meanwhile one fed the men.  Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the Central European command.  Delhi might talk of a great flank march through Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes, and ski-men among the Swiss mountains, and a sudden swoop upon Vienna; the thing was to listen—­and wait for the other side to begin experimenting.  It was all experimenting.  And meanwhile he remained in profile, with an air of assurance—­like a man who sits in an automobile after the chauffeur has had his directions.

And every one about him was the stronger and surer for that quiet face, that air of knowledge and unruffled confidence.  The clustering lights threw a score of shadows of him upon the maps, great bunches of him, versions of a commanding presence, lighter or darker, dominated the field, and pointed in every direction.  Those shadows symbolised his control.  When a messenger came from the wireless room to shift this or that piece in the game, to replace under amended reports one Central European regiment by a score, to draw back or thrust out or distribute this or that force of the Allies, the Marshal would turn his head and seem not to see, or look and nod slightly, as a master nods who approves a pupil’s self-correction.  ‘Yes, that’s better.’

How wonderful he was, thought the woman at the window, how wonderful it all was.  This was the brain of the western world, this was Olympus with the warring earth at its feet.  And he was guiding France, France so long a resentful exile from imperialism, back to her old predominance.

It seemed to her beyond the desert of a woman that she should be privileged to participate....

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.