Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/199

 ready to fill with tears, a lovely figure of a young matron still girlish, palpitating with anxiety, but already dashed by her husband's coolness.

"Why do you laugh?" she pouted.

"People tell me I am the greatest general the world ever knew," he said.

"Your wife knows well that they do," she chimed in, "and proud of it she is."

"You dear little girl!" he exclaimed. "Can you not feel why I laughed? I have lived in camps since I was fourteen. I grew up on incipient mutinies. I deserve as well as I can what men say of me. And you come of a family whose men have been priests and advocates and farmers, but which has never given a general or admiral to the republic, which has so avoided camps, that you are the first woman of your blood to set foot inside one. This is your first hour in a camp and you instruct me how to manage an army! You bring me warnings! Do you wonder that I laughed?"

"You might pay attention to your wife," she pouted.

"Not her warnings, certainly," he said, with an air of finality. "Attention to her I might pay if she had notified me of her coming."

"I wanted to surprise you," she protested. "You have," he acknowledged, "and so much so that I must forego the pleasure of showing