In the hall Marie met her elderly companion, Bertha, now her aunt, Madame Benet.

“I heard you quarrelling,” Bertha protested.  “It is most indiscreet.  It is not in the part of the Countess d’Aurillac that she makes love to her chauffeur.”

Marie laughed noiselessly and drew her farther down the hall.  “He is imbecile!” she exclaimed.  “He will kill me with his solemn face and his conceit.  I make love to him—­yes—­that he may work the more willingly.  But he will have none of it.  He is jealous of the others.”

Madame Benet frowned.

“He resents the others,” she corrected.  “I do not blame him.  He is a gentleman!”

“And the others,” demanded Marie; “were they not of the most noble families of Rome?”

“I am old and I am ugly,” said Bertha, “but to me Anfossi is always as considerate as he is to you who are so beautiful.”

“An Italian gentleman,” returned Marie, “does not serve in Belgian Congo unless it is the choice of that or the marble quarries.”

“I do not know what his past may be,” sighed Madame Benet, “nor do I ask.  He is only a number, as you and I are only numbers.  And I beg you to let us work in harmony.  At such a time your love-affairs threaten our safety.  You must wait.”

Marie laughed insolently.  “With the Du Barry,” she protested, “I can boast that I wait for no man.”

“No,” replied the older woman; “you pursue him!”

Marie would have answered sharply, but on the instant her interest was diverted.  For one week, by day and night, she had lived in a world peopled only by German soldiers.  Beside her in the railroad carriage, on the station platforms, at the windows of the trains that passed the one in which she rode, at the grade crossings, on the bridges, in the roads that paralleled the tracks, choking the streets of the villages and spread over the fields of grain, she had seen only the gray-green uniforms.  Even her professional eye no longer distinguished regiment from regiment, dragoon from grenadier, Uhlan from Hussar or Landsturm.  Stripes, insignia, numerals, badges of rank, had lost their meaning.  Those who wore them no longer were individuals.  They were not even human.  During the three last days the automobile, like a motor-boat fighting the tide, had crept through a gray-green river of men, stained, as though from the banks, by mud and yellow clay.  And for hours, while the car was blocked, and in fury the engine raced and purred, the gray-green river had rolled past her, slowly but as inevitably as lava down the slope of a volcano, bearing on its surface faces with staring eyes, thousands and thousands of eyes, some fierce and bloodshot, others filled with weariness, homesickness, pain.  At night she still saw them:  the white faces under the sweat and dust, the eyes dumb, inarticulate, asking the answer.  She had been suffocated by German soldiers, by the mass of them, engulfed and smothered; she had stifled in a land inhabited only by gray-green ghosts.