slowly and insidiously passing into the identity of a despised and rejected suitor.
Besides, and here I am bound to confess Célestine touches on possibilities too delicate for my insular pen to probe; where, she demands, is the thing to end? Raoul is brave, rash and obviously unlucky. Jean is, one must admit even though one admits it with a shrug, plucky, devoted to his friend, and practically inexhaustible. The possibilities of operative surgery are, as we begin to see, illimitable. The war, at this critical point in the interlaced destinies of these three hapless beings, scarcely beyond its third year, is declared by the majority to be only just beginning, and while some predict a seven years' course for it, others, with just as formidable an artillery of argument, place its continuance at seventy times seven. Soon there must come a point at which Raoul will have become rather more Jean than Raoul and thenceforward he will, after each operation, become Jeanified with increasing momentum. Heart and brain may remain Raoulish (though even here Célestine has no actual guarantee against medical science), but it may be suspected that these attributes are less prominent in Célestine's fond remembrance than Raoul’s prepossessing exterior.
•••••••
"But they all change, sooner or later," says wise maman consolingly. "Be reconciled, my child."
Hastings, 1920.
