Now, for the fist
time, the little Friend of the Flag looked at all the nameless graces
of rank with an envy that her sunny, gladsome, generous nature had never
before been touched with--with a sudden perception, quick as thought,
bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what this
womanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might be in its
highest and purest shape.
"If those are the women that he knew before he came here, I do not
wonder that he never cared to watch even my bamboula," was the
latent, unacknowledged thought that was so cruel to her: the
consciousness--which forced itself in on her, while her eyes jealously
followed the perfect grace of the one in whom instinct had found her
rival--that, while she had been so proud of her recklessness, and her
devilry, and her trooper's slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she
had only been something very worthless, something very lightly held by
those who liked her for a ribald jest, and a dance, and a Spahis' supper
of headlong riot and drunken mirth.
The mood did not last. She was too brave, too fiery, too dauntless,
too untamed. The dusky, angry flush upon her face grew deeper, and the
passion gathered more stormily in her eyes, while she felt the pistol
butts in her sash, and laughed low to herself, where she lay stretched
under her flowery nest.
"Bah! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of these," she
thought, with her old disdain, "and would stand fire no more than
a gazelle! They are only made for summer-day weather, those dainty,
gorgeous, silver pheasants.
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