It was agreed that Dubisson should bring
her in for a short time.
Yet when she did come in I could not look at her. Longuant had just
finished speaking, and I had all my mind could handle to do him justice
as I wished. He spoke as the moderate leader who desired that his
people leave the hatchet unlifted if they could do so with safety. He
gave a robe stained with red to show that his people remembered the
French who had died for them.
I knew, as I repeated Longuant's speech, that I was doing it well,
helping it out with trick and metaphor. And I also knew, with a shrug
for my childishness, that my wits were working more swiftly than they
had, because the woman was listening. I saw the whole scene with added
vividness and significance because her eyes rested on it, too. Once I
glanced up and looked at her briefly. Day had slipped into dusk, and
the bare, shadow-haunted room was lighted with torches stuck in the
crannies of the log walls. The flaring light lapped her like a waving
garment and showed her daintily erect, silk-clad, elate and resolute, a
flower of a carefully tended civilization. And then my eyes went back
where they belonged, to the lines of warriors robed like senators,
attentive and august, full of wisdom where the woman knew nothing, yet
blank as animals to the treasures of her mind.
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