This same yearning was inspiring Marguerite when she came away from her lessons.  She was advancing from one overpowering dread to another, accepting the first rudiments of surgery as the greatest of scientific marvels.  At the same time, she was astonished at the avidity with which she was assimilating these hitherto unsuspected mysteries.  Sometimes with a funny assumption of assurance, she would even believe she had mistaken her vocation.

“Who knows but what I was born to be a famous doctor?” she would exclaim.

Her great fear was that she might lose her self-control when the time came to put her newly acquired knowledge into practice.  To see herself before the foul odors of decomposing flesh, to contemplate the flow of blood—­a horrible thing for her who had always felt an invincible repugnance toward all the unpleasant conditions of ordinary life!  But these hesitations were short, and she was suddenly animated by a dashing energy.  These were times of sacrifice.  Were not the men snatched every day from the comforts of sensuous existence to endure the rude life of a soldier? . . .  She would be, a soldier in petticoats, facing pain, battling with it, plunging her hands into putrefaction, flashing like a ray of sunlight into the places where soldiers were expecting the approach of death.

She proudly narrated to Desnoyers all the progress that she was making in the training school, the complicated bandages that she was learning to adjust, sometimes over a mannikin, at others over the flesh of an employee, trying to play the part of a sorely wounded patient.  She, so dainty, so incapable in her own home of the slightest physical effort, was learning the most skilful ways of lifting a human body from the ground and carrying it on her back.  Who knew but that she might render this very service some day on the battlefield!  She was ready for the greatest risks, with the ignorant audacity of women impelled by flashes of heroism.  All her admiration was for the English army nurses, slender women of nervous vigor whose photographs were appearing in the papers, wearing pantaloons, riding boots and white helmets.

Julio listened to her with astonishment.  Was this woman really Marguerite? . . .  War was obliterating all her winning vanities.  She was no longer fluttering about in bird-like fashion.  Her feet were treading the earth with resolute firmness, calm and secure in the new strength which was developing within.  When one of his caresses would remind her that she was a woman, she would always say the same thing,

“What luck that you are a foreigner! . . .  What happiness to know that you do not have to go to war!”

In her anxiety for sacrifice, she wanted to go to the battlefields, and yet at the same time, she was rejoicing to see her lover exempt from military duty.  This preposterous lack of logic was not gratefully received by Julio but irritated him as an unconscious offense.