Perhaps, for the first and last time, she saw Clayton Spencer that
morning with her mind, as well as with her heart. She saw him big and
generous and fine, but she saw him also not quite so big as his love,
conventional, bound by tradition and early training, somewhat rigid,
Calvinistic, and dominated still by a fierce sex pride.
At once the weaknesses of the middle span, and its safety. And,
woman-fashion, she loved him for both his weakness and his strength. A
bigger man might have taken her. A smaller man would have let her
go. Clay was--just Clay; single-hearted, intelligent but not shrewd,
blundering, honest Clay.
She was one great ache for the shelter of his arms.
She had a small sense of shame that, on that day of all others, she
should be obsessed with her own affairs.
This was a great day. That morning, if all went well, the war was to
cease. The curtain was to fall on the great melodrama, and those who
had watched it and those who had played in it would with the drop of the
curtain turn away from the illusion that is war, to the small and quiet
things of home.
"Home!" she repeated. She had no home. But it was a great day,
nevertheless. Only that morning the white-capped femme de chambre had
said, with exaltation in her great eyes: "So! It is finished, Madame, or soon it will be--in an hour or two."
"It will be finished, Suzanne."
"And Madame will go back to the life she lived before." Her eyes
had turned to where, on the dressing-table, lay the gold fittings of
Audrey's dressing-case. She visualized Audrey, back in rich, opulent
America, surrounded by the luxury the gold trinkets would indicate.
"Madame must be lovely in the costume for a ball," she said, and sighed.
For her, a farm in Brittany, the endless round of small duties; for the
American-Sitting there alone Audrey felt already the reactions of peace. The war
had torn up such roots as had held her. She was terribly aware, too,
that she had outgrown her old environment. The old days were gone. The
old Audrey was gone; and in her place was a quiet woman, whose hands had
known service and would never again be content to be idle. Yet she knew
that, with the war, the world call would be gone. Not again, for her,
detached, impersonal service. She was not of the great of the earth.
What she wanted, quite simply, was the service of love. To have her own
and to care for them. She hoped, very earnestly, that she would be able
to look beyond her own four walls, to see distress and to help it, but
she knew, as she knew herself, that the real call to her would always be
love.