tomboyish. She had a mass of lustrous black hair and a mouth rather
large in repose, but capable of changing curves of emotion. Her large,
dark eyes, luminously deep under long lashes, if not the rest of her
face, had beauty. Her head was bent, the lashes forming a line with her
brow now, and her eyes had the still flame of wonder that they had when
she was looking all around a thing and through it to find what it meant.
Westerling knew by the signs that she was going to break out with one of
her visions, rather than one of her whimsical ideas. She was seeing the
Roman general, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little
man, no less in the life than Hedworth Westerling. She had fused them
into one.

"Some day you will be chief of staff, the head of the Gray army!" she
suddenly exclaimed.

Westerling started as if he had been surprised in a secret. Then he
flushed slightly.

"Why?" he asked with forced carelessness. "Your reasons? They're more
interesting than your prophecy."

"Because you have the will to be," she said without emphasis, in the
impersonal revelations of thought. "You want power. You have ambition."

He looked the picture of it, with his square jaw, his well-moulded head
set close to the shoulders on a sturdy neck, his even teeth showing as
his lips parted in an unconscious smile.

"Marta, Marta! She is--is so explosive," Mrs. Galland remarked
apologetically to the colonel.