I can imagine you, wrinkling your brows at me and telling me that that frame of mind comes of my theatre-going habit.  Well, it is not worth while arguing it out.  I can’t.  There is a kind of veil over it.

Nor were the day’s mental adventures over.

I was just back from my promenade when my little French friend from the foot of the hill came to the door.  I call her “my little friend,” though she is taller than I am, because she is only half my age.  She came with the proposition that I should harness Ninette and go with her out to the battlefield, where, she said, they were sadly in need of help.

I asked her how she knew, and she replied that one of our old men had been across the river and brought back the news that the field ambulance at Neufmortier was short of nurses, and that it was thought that there were still many wounded men in the woods who had not yet been picked up.

I asked her if any official call for help had come.  She said “No,” but she presented so strong a case in favor of volunteering that, at first, it seemed to me that there was nothing to do but go, and go quickly.

But before she got outside the gate I rushed after her to tell her that it seemed impossible,—­that I knew they didn’t want an old lady like me, however willing, an old lady very unsteady on her feet, absolutely ignorant of the simplest rules of “first aid to the wounded,” that they needed skilled and tried people, that we not only could not lend efficient aid, but should be a nuisance, even if, which I doubted, we were allowed to cross the Marne.

All the time I was explaining myself, with that diabolical dual consciousness which makes us spectator and listener to ourselves, in the back of my brain—­or my soul—­was running this query:  “I wonder what a raw battlefield looks like?  I have a chance to see if I want to—­ perhaps.”  I suppose that was an attack of involuntary, unpremeditated curiosity.  I did not want to go.

I wonder if that was not the sort of thing which, if told in the confessional in ancient times, got one convicted of being “possessed of the devil”?

Of course Mlle. Henriette was terribly disappointed.  Her mother would not let her go without me.  I imagine the wise lady knew that I would not go.  She tried to insist, but my mind was made up.

She argued that we could “hunt for the dead,” and “carry consolation to the dying.”  I shook my head.  I even had to cut the argument short by going into the house.  I felt an imperative need to get the door closed between us.  The habit I have—­you know it well, it is often enough disconcerting to me—­of getting an ill-timed comic picture in my mind, made me afraid that I was going to laugh at the wrong moment.  If I had, I should never have been able to explain to her, and hope to be understood.