Besides, the knowledge that the exploiters of this woman were the ones that had denounced her, had aroused his knightly enthusiasm in the defense of her indefensible cause.
Appearance before the Council of War had proved painful and dramatic.
Freya, who until then, had seemed brutalized by the regime of the prison, roused herself upon being confronted by a dozen grave and uniformed men.
Her first moves were those of every handsome and coquettish female.

She knew perfectly well her physical influence.

These soldiers transformed into judges were recalling those other flirts that she had seen at the teas and grand balls at the hotels....

What Frenchman can resist feminine attraction ?...
She had smiled, she had replied to the first questions with graceful modesty, fixing her wickedly guileless eyes upon the officials seated behind the presidential table, and on those other men in blue uniform, charged with accusing her or reading the documents of her prosecution.
But something cold and hostile existed in the atmosphere and paralyzed her smiles, leaving her words without echo and making ineffectual the splendors of her eyes.

All foreheads were bowed under the weight of severe thought: all the men in that instant appeared thirty years older.