II

Mlle. Javal, although living the usual restricted life before the war, and far removed from that section of her class that had begun to astonish Paris by an unprecedented surrender to the extravagancies in public which seemed to obsess the world before Europe abruptly returned to its normal historic condition of warfare, was as highly educated, as conversant with the affairs of the day, political, intellectual, and artistic, as any young woman in Europe.  But the war found her in a semi-invalid condition and heartbroken over the death of her mother, whom she had nursed devotedly through a long illness; her girlhood intimacies broken up not only by the marriage of her friends, but also by her own long seclusion; and—­being quite French—­feeling too aged, at a little over thirty, ever to interest any man again, aside from her fortune.  In short she regarded her life as finished, but she kept house dutifully for her brother—­her only close relation—­and surrendered herself to melancholy reflections.

Then came the war.  At first she took merely the languid interest demanded by her intelligence, being too absorbed in her own low condition to experience more than a passing thrill of patriotic fervor.  But she still read the newspapers, and, moreover, women in those first anxious days were meeting and talking far more frequently than was common to a class that preferred their own house and garden to anything their friends, or the boulevards, or even the parks of Paris, could offer them.  Mlle. Javal found herself seeing more and more of that vast circle of inherited friends as well as family connections which no well-born bourgeoise can escape, and gradually became infected with the excitement of the hour; despite the fact that she believed her poor worn-out body never would take a long walk again.

Then, one day, the thought suddenly illuminated her awakening mind:  “How fortunate I am!  I have no one to lose in this terrible war!” (Her brother was too delicate for service.) “These tears I see every day after news has come that a father, a brother, a husband, a son, has fallen on the battlefield or died of horrible agony in hospital, I shall never shed.  Almost alone of the many I know, and the millions of women in France, I am mercifully exempt from an agony that has no end.  If I were married, and were older and had sons, I should be suffering unendurably now.  I am fortunate indeed and feel an ingrate that I have ever repined.”

Then naturally enough followed the thought that it behooved her to do something for her country, not only as a manifest of thanksgiving but also because it was her duty as a young woman of wealth and leisure.

Oddly enough considering the delicate health in which she firmly believed, she tried to be a nurse.  There were many amateurs in the hospitals in those days when France was as short of nurses as of everything else except men, and she was accepted.