Vivie agreed with her, cordially.

She—­Vivie—­I really ought to begin calling her “Vivien”:  she is forty-one by now—­in resuming her duties at the Hopital de St. Pierre found no repugnance in tending wounded German soldiers—­the officers she did shrink from—­She realized that the soldiers were but the slaves of the officer class, of Kaiserdom.  Her reward for this degree of Christianity was to have a batch of wounded English boys or men to look after.  She saw again Bertie Adams in many of them, especially in the sergeants and corporals.  They, in turn, thought her a very handsome, stately lady, but rather maudlin at times.  “So easy to set ‘er off a-cryin’ as though ’er ’eart would break, poor thing....  And I says ‘why ma’am, the pain’s nuthin’, nuthin’ to what it use ter be.’  ‘Spec’ she lost some son in the war.  Wonder ’ow she came to be ’ere?  Ain’t the Germans afraid of ’er!"...

They were.  The mental agony she had been through had etherialized her face, added to its look of age and gravity, but imparted likewise a sort of “awfulness.”  She exhaled an aura of righteous authority.  She had been through the furnace, and foolishness and petulance had been burnt out of her ... though, thank goodness, she retained some sense of humour.  She had probably never been so handsome from the painter’s point of view, though one could not imagine a young man falling in love with her now.

Her personality was first definitely noted by the Bruxellois the day that von Bissing’s funeral cortege passed through the streets of Brussels on its way to Germany.  Vivien Warren was sufficiently restored to health then to stand on the steps of some monument and cry “Vive la Belgique!  A bas les tyrans!” The policemen and the spies looked another way and affected deafness.  They had orders not to arrest her unless she actually resorted to firearms or other lethal weapons.

It was said that her appeal for Bertie Adams did reach the Emperor, two days too late; that he pished and pshawed over von Bissing’s cruel precipitancy.  “Englishmen,” he muttered to his entourage, “don’t assassinate.  The Irish do.  But how I’m going to make peace with England, I don’t know...!”

(His Hell on Earth must have been that few people admired the English character more than he did, and yet, unprovoked, he had blundered into war with England.)

However, though it was too late to save “this lunatic Adams,” he gave orders that Vivie was to be let alone.  He even, through Graefin von Stachelberg, transmitted to her his regrets that she and her mother had been treated so cavalierly at the Hotel Imperial.  It was not through any orders of his.