Such reasoning was not in the province of his training.  He feared that she was about to become hysterical.

“Really, Miss Galland, I—­women and children—­I—­” he was stammering.

“Better kill the children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!” she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria.  “Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the masculine privilege of murder.”

“Miss Galland, you are overwrought.  I—­”

She interrupted him with half-breathed laughter.

“Don’t I look it—­hysterical?” she exclaimed.  “How awkward for you if I should fall on the floor and kick and scream!”

With a peculiar uplifting of the brows which spoke a brittle humor, she looked at the floor as if selecting a place for the performance.

“That is not your way,” he managed to say.  He was quite adrift in confusion at the recollection of quotations he had heard about woman’s subtleties and inconsistencies and her charm.  Resorting to the last weapon in his armory—­which the captain of engineers had already used—­his attitude changed to a soldierly sternness.  “Miss Galland, I feel that it is my duty, as long as you are going to stay, to make sure that—­”

She killed the sentence on his lips with a gleam of mockery from her eyes.  He understood that she had again anticipated what he was going to say.

“There are times when you must be firm with a woman, aren’t there?  And the time has come for you to be firm!” The color in his cheeks deepened.  He knew what to do with his men on the knoll, but not what to do in the present situation.  “This is our home; our home is our country.  Here we remain; but, naturally, we don’t propose to stick our heads out of the windows in a shower of shrapnel bullets,” she continued.  “Even your soldiers are not so zealous for death but they fight behind sand-bags.  They are not like Mohammedan fatalists who so love to die for their illusions that they bare their breasts to bullets.  We have already arranged sleeping-quarters in the rear.  Good night!”

She held out her hand with a smile of conventional pleasantry.  Had it not been for the sound of firing, which still continued, and for the walls denuded of pictures, they might have been parting at the head of the stairs at a house-party.  She stopped half-way up in an impulse to call back happily: 

“You see, masculine firmness did calm feminine hysteria!”

“Oh, Miss Galland!” he exclaimed.  “Miss Galland, you are beyond me!”

“What a pose!  How foolish to break out in that way!” she thought angrily, as she hastened up the rest of the flight and along the corridor.  “To him of all men!  A pattern-plate of an officer, who never has had anything but a military thought!  But everything is pose!  Everything is abnormal!  And sleep?  Sleep is a pose, too.  I feel as if my eyes would remain open forever.  Oh, I wish they would begin the fighting and tear the house to pieces if they are going to!  I wish—­”