A few months before I arrived there her husband had contracted some sort of poisoning in the trenches and had been brought back to Cassel, where he died.

Madame Blanche interested me; she was very slim and prim and neat and tightly laced.

Her fair hair was always very carefully crimped.

She looked like a girl out of a painting by Metsu or Van Meer.

I could see her posing at a piano for either, calm, gentle and silent; and could imagine her in the midst of all the refined surroundings in which these artists would have painted her.