Part + 

I + 

I + 

Slowly, amidst intolerable noises from, on the one hand the street and, on the other, from the large and voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone began, for Valentine, to assume an aspect that, years ago it had used to have⁠—of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny. + 

The telephone, for some ingeniously torturing reason, was in a corner of the great schoolroom without any protection and, called imperatively, at a moment of considerable suspense, out of the asphalte playground where, under her command ranks of girls had stood electrically only just within the margin of control, Valentine with the receiver at her ear was plunged immediately into incomprehensible news uttered by a voice that she seemed half to remember. Right in the middle of a sentence it hit her: + 

“… that he ought presumably to be under control, which you mightn’t like!”; after that the noise burst out again and rendered the voice inaudible. + 

It occurred to her that probably at that minute the whole population of the world needed to be under control; she knew she herself did. But she had no male relative that the verdict could apply to in especial. Her brother? But he was on a minesweeper. In dock at the moment. And now⁠ ⁠… safe for good! There was also an aged great uncle that she had never seen. Dean of somewhere⁠ ⁠… Hereford? Exeter?⁠ ⁠… Somewhere.⁠ ⁠… Had she just said safe? She was shaken with joy! + 

She said into the mouthpiece: + 

“Valentine Wannop speaking.⁠ ⁠… Physical Instructress at this school, you know!” + 

She had to present an appearance of sanity⁠ ⁠… a sane voice at the very least! + 

The tantalisingly half-remembered voice in the telephone now got in some more incomprehensibilities. It came as if from caverns and as if with exasperated rapidity it exaggerated its s’s with an effect of spitting vehemence. + 

“His brothers.s.s got pneumonia, so his mistress.ss.ss even is unavailable to look after.⁠ ⁠…” + 

The voice disappeared; then it emerged again with: + 

“They’re said to be friends now!” + 

It was drowned then, for a long period in a sea of shrill girl’s voices from the playground, in an ocean of factory-hooters’ ululations, amongst innumerable explosions that trod upon one another’s heels. From where on earth did they get explosives, the population of squalid suburban streets amidst which the school lay? For the matter of that where did they get the spirits to make such an appalling row? Pretty drab people! Inhabiting liver-coloured boxes. Not on the face of it an imperial race. + 

The sibilating voice in the telephone went on spitting out spitefully that the porter said he had no furniture at all; that he did not appear to recognise the porter.⁠ ⁠… Improbable sounding pieces of information half-extinguished by the external sounds but uttered in a voice that seemed to mean to give pain by what it said. + 

Nevertheless it was impossible not to take it gaily. The thing, out there, miles and miles away must have been signed⁠—a few minutes ago. She imagined along an immense line sullen and disgruntled cannon sounding for a last time. + 

“I haven’t,” Valentine Wannop shouted into the mouthpiece, “the least idea of what you want or who you are.” + 

She got back a title.⁠ ⁠… Lady someone or other.⁠ ⁠… It might have been Blastus. She imagined that one of the lady governoresses of the school must be wanting to order something in the way of school sports organised to celebrate the auspicious day. A lady governoress or other was always wanting something done by the School to celebrate something. No doubt the Head who was not wanting in a sense of humour⁠—not absolutely wanting!⁠—had turned this lady of title on to Valentine Wannop after having listened with patience to her for half an hour. The Head had certainly sent out to where in the playground they all had stood breathless, to tell Valentine Wannop that there was someone on the telephone that she⁠—Miss Wanostrocht, the said Head⁠—thought that she, Miss Wannop, ought to listen to.⁠ ⁠… Then: Miss Wanostrocht must have been able to distinguish what had been said by the now indistinguishable lady of title. But of course that had been ten minutes ago⁠ ⁠… Before the maroons or the sirens, whichever it had been, had sounded.⁠ ⁠… “The porter said he had no furniture at all.⁠ ⁠… He did not appear to recognise the porter.⁠ ⁠… Ought presumably to be under control!”⁠ ⁠… Valentine’s mind thus recapitulated the information that she had from Lady (provisionally) Blastus. She imagined now that the Lady must be concerned for the superannuated drill-sergeant the school had had before it had acquired her, Valentine, as physical instructor. She figured to herself the venerable, mumbling gentleman, with several ribbons on a black commissionaire’s tunic. In an almshouse, probably. Placed there by the Governors of the school. Had pawned his furniture no doubt.⁠ ⁠… + 

Intense heat possessed Valentine Wannop. She imagined indeed her eyes flashing. Was this the moment? + 

She didn’t even know whether what they had let off had been maroons or aircraft guns or sirens. It had happened⁠—the noise, whatever it was⁠—whilst she had been coming through the underground passage from the playground to the schoolroom to answer this wicked telephone. So she had not heard the sound. She had missed the sound for which the ears of a world had waited for years, for a generation. For an eternity. No sound. When she had left the playground there had been dead silence. All waiting: girls rubbing one ankle with the other rubber sole.⁠ ⁠… + 

Then.⁠ ⁠… For the rest of her life she was never to be able to remember the greatest stab of joy that had ever been known by waiting millions. There would be no one but she who would not be able to remember that.⁠ ⁠… Probably a stirring of the heart that was like a stab; probably a catching of the breath that was like an inhalation of flame!⁠ ⁠… It was over now; they were by now in a situation; a condition, something that would affect certain things in certain ways.⁠ ⁠… + 

She remembered that the putative ex-drill sergeant had a brother who had pneumonia and thus an unavailable mistress.⁠ ⁠… + 

She was about to say to herself: + 

“That’s just my luck!” when she remembered good-humouredly that her luck was not like that at all. On the whole she had had good luck⁠—ups and downs. A good deal of anxiety at one time⁠—but who hadn’t had! But good health; a mother with good health; a brother safe.⁠ ⁠… Anxieties, yes! But nothing that had gone so very wrong.⁠ ⁠… + 

This then was an exceptional stroke of bad luck! Might it be no omen⁠—to the effect that things in future would go wrong: to the effect that she would miss other universal experiences. Never marry, say; or never know the joy of childbearing: if it was a joy! Perhaps it was; perhaps it wasn’t. One said one thing, one another. At any rate might it not be an omen that she would miss some universal and necessary experience!⁠ ⁠… Never see Carcassonne, the French said.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps she would never see the Mediterranean. You could not be a proper man if you had never seen the Mediterranean: the sea of Tibullus, of the Anthologists, of Sappho, even.⁠ ⁠… Blue: incredibly blue! + 

People would be able to travel now. It was incredible! Incredible! Incredible! But you could. Next week you would be able to! You could call a taxi? And go to Charing Cross! And have a porter! A whole porter!⁠ ⁠… The wings, the wings of a dove: then would I flee away, flee away and eat pomegranates beside an infinite wash tub of Reckitt’s blue. Incredible, but you could! + 

She felt eighteen again. Cocky! She said, using the good, metallic, Cockney bottoms of her lungs that she had used for shouting back at interrupters at Suffrage meetings before⁠ ⁠… before this⁠ ⁠… she shouted blatantly into the telephone: + 

“I say, whoever you are! I suppose they have done it; did they announce it in your parts by maroons or sirens?” She repeated it three times, she did not care for Lady Blastus or Lady Blast Anybody else. She was going to leave that old school and eat pomegranates in the shadow of the rock where Penelope, wife of Ulysses, did her washing. With lashings of blue in the water! Was all your underlinen bluish in those parts owing to the colour of the sea? She could! She could! She could! Go with her mother and brother and all to where you could eat⁠ ⁠… Oh new potatoes! In December, the sea being blue.⁠ ⁠… What songs the Sirens sang and whether.⁠ ⁠… + 

She was not going to show respect for any Lady anything ever again. She had had to hitherto, independent young woman of means though she were, so as not to damage the School and Miss Wanostrocht with the Governoresses. Now⁠ ⁠… She was never going to show respect for anyone ever again. She had been through the mill: the whole world had been through the mill! No more respect! + 

As she might have expected she got it in the neck immediately afterwards⁠—for over cockiness! + 

The hissing, bitter voice from the telephone enunciated the one address she did not want to hear: + 

“Lincolnss..s.s⁠ ⁠… sInn!” + 

Sin!⁠ ⁠… Like the Devil! + 

It hurt. + 

The cruel voice said: + 

“I’m s.s.peaking from there!” + 

Valentine said courageously: + 

“Well; it’s a great day. I suppose you’re bothered by the cheering like me. I can’t hear what you want. I don’t care. Let ’em cheer!” + 

She felt like that. She should not have. + 

The voice said: + 

“You remember your Carlyle.⁠ ⁠…” + 

It was exactly what she did not want to hear. With the receiver hard at her ear she looked round at the great schoolroom⁠—the Hall, made to let a thousand girls sit silent while the Head made the speeches that were the note of the School. Repressive!⁠ ⁠… The place was like a noncomformist chapel. High, bare walls with Gothic windows running up to a pitch-pine varnished roof. Repression, the note of the place; the place, the very place not to be in today.⁠ ⁠… You ought to be in the streets, hitting policemen’s helmets with bladders. This was Cockney London: that was how Cockney London expressed itself. Hit policemen innocuously because policemen were stiff, embarrassed at these tributes of affection, swayed in rejoicing mobs over whose heads they looked remotely, like poplar trees jostled by vulgarer vegetables! + 

But she was there, being reminded of the dyspepsia of Thomas Carlyle! + 

“Oh!” she exclaimed into the instrument, “You’re Edith Ethel!” Edith Ethel Duchemin, now of course Lady Macmaster! But you weren’t used to thinking of her as Lady Somebody. + 

The last person in the world: the very last! Because, long ago she had made up her mind that it was all over between herself and Edith Ethel. She certainly could not make any advance to the ennobled personage who vindictively disapproved of all things made⁠—with a black thought in a black shade, as you might say. Of all things that were not being immediately useful to Edith Ethel! + 

And, aesthetically draped and meagre, she had sets of quotations for appropriate occasions. Rossetti for Love; Browning for optimism⁠—not frequent that: Walter Savage Landor to show acquaintance with more esoteric prose. And the unfailing quotation from Carlyle for damping off saturnalia: for New Year’s Day, Te Deums, Victories, anniversaries, celebrations.⁠ ⁠… It was coming over the wire now, that quotation: + 

“.⁠ ⁠… And then I remembered that it was the birthday of their Redeemer!” + 

How well Valentine knew it: how often with spiteful conceit had not Edith Ethel intoned that. A passage from the diary of the Sage of Chelsea who lived near the Barracks. + 

“Today,” the quotation ran, “I saw that the soldiers by the public house at the corner were more than usually drunk. And then I remembered that it was the birthday of their Redeemer!” + 

How superior of the Sage of Chelsea not to remember till then that that had been Christmas Day! Edith Ethel, too, was trying to show how superior she was. She wanted to prove that until she, Valentine Wannop, had reminded her, Lady Macmaster, that that day had about it something of the popularly festival she, Lady Mac, had been unaware of the fact. Really quite unaware, you know. She lived in her rapt seclusion along with Sir Vincent⁠—the critic, you know: their eyes fixed on the higher things, they disregarded maroons and had really a quite remarkable collection, by now, of first editions, official-titled friends and At Homes to their credit. + 

Yet Valentine remembered that once she had sat at the feet of the darkly mysterious Edith Ethel Duchemin⁠—Where had that all gone?⁠—and had sympathised with her marital martyrdoms, her impressive taste in furniture, her large rooms and her spiritual adulteries. So she said good-humouredly to the instrument: + 

“Aren’t you just the same, Edith Ethel? And what can I do for you?” + 

The good-natured patronage in her tone astonished her, and she was astonished, too, at the ease with which she spoke. Then she realised that the noises had been going away: silence was falling: the cries receded. They were going towards a cumulation at a distance. The girls’ voices in the playground no longer existed: the Head must have let them go. Naturally, too, the local population wasn’t going to go on letting off crackers in side streets.⁠ ⁠… She was alone: cloistered with the utterly improbable! + 

Lady Macmaster had sought her out and here was she, Valentine Wannop; patronising Lady Macmaster! Why? What could Lady Macmaster want her to do? She couldn’t⁠—But of course she jolly well could!⁠—be thinking of being unfaithful to Macmaster and be wanting her, Valentine Wannop, to play the innocent, the virginal gooseberry or Disciple. Or alibi. Whatever it was. Goose was the most appropriate word.⁠ ⁠… Obviously Macmaster was the sort of person to whom any Lady Macmaster would want⁠—would have⁠—to be unfaithful. A little, dark-bearded, drooping, deprecatory fellow. A typical Critic! All Critic’s wives were probably unfaithful to them. They lacked the creative gift. What did you call it? A word unfit for a young lady to use! + 

Her mind ran about in this unbridled, Cockney schoolgirl’s vein. There was no stopping it. It was in honour of the day! She was temporarily inhibited from bashing policemen on the head, so she was mentally disrespectful to constituted authority⁠—to Sir Vincent Macmaster, Principal Secretary to H.M. Department of Statistics, author of Walter Savage Lander, a Critical Monograph, and of twenty-two other Critical Monographs in the Eminent Bores’ Series.⁠ ⁠… Such books! And she was being disrespectful and patronising to Lady Macmaster, Egeria to innumerable Scottish Men of Letters! No more respect! Was that to be a lasting effect of the cataclysm that had involved the world? The late cataclysm! Thank God, since ten minutes ago they could call it the late cataclysm! + 

She was positively tittering in front of the telephone from which Lady Macmaster’s voice was now coming in earnest, cajoling tones⁠—as if she knew that Valentine was not paying very much attention, saying: + 

“Valentine! Valentine! Valentine!” + 

Valentine said negligently: + 

“I’m listening!” + 

She wasn’t really. She was really reflecting on whether there had not been more sense on the Mistress’s Conference that that morning, solemnly, had taken place in the Head’s private room. Undoubtedly what the Mistresses with the Head at their head had feared was that if they, Headmistresses, Mistresses, Masters, Pastors⁠—by whom I was made etcetera!⁠—should cease to be respected because saturnalia broke out on the sounding of a maroon the whole world would go to pieces! An awful thought! The Girls no longer sitting silent in the nonconformist hall while the Head addressed repressive speeches to them.⁠ ⁠… + 

She had addressed a speech, containing the phrase: “the Credit of a Great Public School,” in that Hall only last afternoon in which, fair thin woman, square elbowed, with a little of sunlight really still in her coiled fair hair, she had seriously requested the Girls not again to repeat the manifestations of joy of the day before. The day before there had been a false alarm and the School⁠—Horribly!⁠—had sung: + 

“Hang Kaiser Bill from the hoar apple tree + 

And Glory Glory Glory till it’s teatime!” + 

The Head, now, making her speech was certain that she had now before her a chastened School, a School that anyhow felt foolish because the rumour of the day before had turned out to be a canard. So she impressed on the Girls the nature of the joy they ought to feel: a joy repressed that should send them silent home. Blood was to cease to be shed: a fitting cause for home-joy⁠—as it were a home-lesson. But there was to be no triumph. The very fact that you ceased hostilities precluded triumph.⁠ ⁠… + 

Valentine, to her surprise, had found herself wondering when you might feel triumph?⁠ ⁠… You couldn’t whilst you were still contending: you must not when you had won! Then when? The Head told the girls that it was their province as the future mothers of England⁠—Nay, of reunited Europe!⁠—to⁠—well, in fact, to go on with their home-lessons and not run about the streets with effigies of the Great Defeated! She put it that it was their function to shed further light of womanly culture⁠—that there, Thank Heaven, they had never been allowed to forget!⁠—athwart a re-illumined Continent.⁠ ⁠… As if you could light up now there was no fear of submarines or raids! + 

And Valentine wondered why, for a mutinous moment, she had wanted to feel triumph⁠ ⁠… had wanted someone to feel triumph. Well, he⁠ ⁠… they⁠ ⁠… had wanted it so much. Couldn’t they have it just for a moment⁠—for the space of one Benkollerdy! Even if it were wrong? or vulgar? Something human, someone had once said, is dearer than a wilderness of decalogues! + 

But at the Mistress’s Conference that morning, Valentine had realised that what was really frightening them was the other note. A quite definite fear. If, at this parting of the ways, at this crack across the table of History, the School⁠—the World, the future mothers of Europe⁠—got out of hand, would they ever come back? The Authorities⁠—Authority all over the world⁠—was afraid of that; more afraid of that than of any other thing. Wasn’t it a possibility that there was to be no more Respect? None for constituted Authority and consecrated Experience? + 

And, listening to the fears of those careworn, faded, ill-nourished gentlewomen, Valentine Wannop had found herself speculating. + 

“No more respect.⁠ ⁠… For the Equator! For the Metric system. For Sir Walter Scott! Or George Washington! Or Abraham Lincoln! Or the Seventh Commandment!!!!!!” + 

And she had a blushing vision of fair, shy, square-elbowed Miss Wanostrocht⁠—the Head!⁠—succumbing to some specious-tongued beguiler!⁠ ⁠… That was where the shoe really pinched! You had to keep them⁠—the Girls, the Populace, everybody!⁠—in hand now, for once you let go there was no knowing where They, like waters parted from the seas, mightn’t carry You. Goodness knew! You might arrive anywhere⁠—at county families taking to trade; gentlefolk selling for profit! All the unthinkable sorts of things! + 

And with a little inward smirk of pleasure Valentine realised that that Conference was deciding that the Girls were to be kept in the playground that morning⁠—at Physical Jerks. She hadn’t ever put up with much in the way of patronage from the rather untidy-haired bookish branch of the establishment. Still, accomplished Classicist as she once had been, she had had to acknowledge that the bookish branch of a School was what you might call the Senior Service. She was there only to oblige⁠—because her distinguished father had insisted on paying minute attention to her physique which was vital and admirable. She had been there, for some time past only to oblige⁠—War Work and all that⁠—but still she had always kept her place and had never hitherto raised her voice at a Mistress’s Conference. So it was indeed the World Turned Upside Down⁠—already!⁠—when Miss Wanostrocht hopefully from behind her desk decorated with two pale pink carnations said: + 

“The idea is, Miss Wannop, that They should be kept⁠—that you should keep them, please⁠—as nearly as possible⁠—isn’t it called?⁠—at attention until the⁠—eh⁠—noises⁠ ⁠… announce the⁠ ⁠… well, you know. Then we suppose they will have to give, say, three cheers. And then perhaps you could get them⁠—in an orderly way⁠—back to their classrooms.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Valentine felt that she was by no means certain that she could. It was not really practicable to keep every one of six hundred aligned girls under your eye. Still she was ready to have a shot. She was ready to concede that it might not be altogether⁠—oh, expedient!⁠—to turn six hundred girls stark mad with excitement into the streets already filled with populations that would no doubt be also stark mad with excitement. You had better keep them in if you could. She would have a shot. And she was pleased. She felt fit: amazingly fit! Fit to do the quarter in⁠ ⁠… oh, in any time! And to give a clump on the jaw to any large, troublesome Jewish type of maiden⁠—or Anglo-Teutonic⁠—who should try to break ranks. Which was more than the Head or any one of the other worried and underfed ones could do. She was pleased that they recognised it. Still she was also generous and recognising that the world ought not really to be turned upside down at any rate until the maroons went, she said: + 

“Of course I will have a shot at it. But it would be a reinforcement, in the way of keeping order, if the Head⁠—you Miss Wanostrocht⁠—and one or two others of the Mistresses would be strolling about. In relays, of course; not all of the staff all the morning⁠ ⁠…” + 

That had been two and a half hours or so ago: before the world changed, the Conference having taken place at eight-thirty. Now here she was, after having kept those girls pretty exhaustingly jumping about for most of the intervening time⁠—here she was treating with disrespect obviously constituted Authority. For whom ought you to respect if not the wife of the Head of a Department, with a title, a country place and most highly attended Thursday afternoons? + 

She was not really listening to the telephone because Edith Ethel was telling her about the condition of Sir Vincent: so overworked, poor man, over Statistics that a nervous breakdown was imminently to be expected. Worried over money, too. Those dreadful taxes for this iniquitous affair.⁠ ⁠… + 

Valentine took leisure to wonder why⁠—why in the world!⁠—Miss Wanostrocht who must know at the least the burden of Edith Ethel’s story had sent for her to hear this farrago? Miss Wanostrocht must know: she had obviously been talked to by Edith Ethel for long enough to form a judgment. Then the matter must be of importance. Urgent even, since the keeping of discipline in the playground was of such utter importance to Miss Wanostrocht: a crucial point in the history of the School and the mothers of Europe. + 

But to whom then could Lady Macmaster’s communication be of life and death importance? To her, Valentine Wannop? It could not be: there were no events of importance that could affect her life outside the playground, her mother safe at home and her brother safe on a minesweeper in Pembroke Dock.⁠ ⁠… + 

Then⁠ ⁠… of importance to Lady Macmaster herself? But how? What could she do for Lady Macmaster? Was she wanted to teach Sir Vincent to perform physical exercises so that he might avoid his nervous breakdown and, in excess of physical health, get the mortgage taken off his country place which she gathered was proving an overwhelming burden on account of iniquitous taxes the result of a war that ought never to have been waged? + 

It was absurd to think that she could be wanted for that! An absurd business.⁠ ⁠… There she was, bursting with health, strength, good-humour, perfectly full of beans⁠—there she was, ready in the cause of order to give Leah Heldenstamm, the large girl, no end of a clump on the side of the jaw or, alternatively, for the sake of all the beanfeastishnesses in the world to assist in the amiable discomfiture of the police. There she was in a sort of noncomformist cloister. Nunlike! Positively nunlike! At the parting of the ways of the universe! + 

She whistled slightly to herself. + 

“By Jove,” she exclaimed coolly, “I hope it does not mean an omen that I’m to be⁠—oh, nunlike⁠—for the rest of my career in the reconstructed world!” + 

She began for a moment seriously to take stock of her position⁠—of her whole position in life. It had certainly been hitherto rather nunlike. She was twenty-threeish: rising twenty-four. As fit as a fiddle; as clean as a whistle. Five foot four in her gym shoes. And no one had ever wanted to marry her. No doubt that was because she was so clean and fit. No one even had ever tried to seduce her. That was certainly because she was so clean-run. She didn’t obviously offer⁠—What was it the fellow called it?⁠—promise of pneumatic bliss to the gentlemen with sergeant-majors’ horseshoe moustaches and gurglish voices! She never would. Then perhaps she would never marry. And never be seduced! + 

Nunlike! She would have to stand at an attitude of attention beside a telephone all her life; in an empty schoolroom with the world shouting from the playground. Or not even shouting from the playground any more. Gone to Piccadilly! + 

… But, hang it all, she wanted some fun! Now! + 

For years now she had been⁠—oh, yes, nunlike!⁠—looking after the lungs and limbs of the girls of the adenoidy, nonconformistish⁠—really undenominational or so little Established as made no difference!⁠—Great Public Girls’ School. She had had to worry about impossible but not repulsive little Cockney creatures’ breathing when they had their arms extended.⁠ ⁠… You mustn’t breathe rhythmically with your movements. No. No. No!⁠ ⁠… Don’t breathe out with the first movement and in with the second! Breathe naturally! Look at me!⁠ ⁠… She breathed perfectly! + 

Well, for years that! War-work for a b⁠⸺⁠y Pro-German. Or Pacifist. Yes, that too she had been for years. She hadn’t liked being it because it was the attitude of the superior and she did not like being superior. Like Edith Ethel! + 

But now! Wasn’t it manifest? She could put her hand wholeheartedly into the hand of any Tom, Dick or Harry. And wish him luck! Wholeheartedly! Luck for himself and for his enterprise. She came back: into the fold: into the Nation even. She could open her mouth! She could let out the good little Cockney yelps that were her birthright. She could be free, independent! + 

Even her dear, blessed, muddleheaded, tremendously eminent mother by now had a depressed looking Secretary. She, Valentine Wannop, didn’t have to sit up all night typing after all day enjoining perfection of breathing in the playground.⁠ ⁠… By Jove they could go all, brother, mother in untidy black and mauve, secretary in untidy black without mauve, and she, Valentine, out of her imitation Girl Scout’s uniform and in⁠—oh, white muslin or Harris tweeds⁠—and with Cockney yawps discuss the cooking under the stone-pines of Amalfi. By the Mediterranean.⁠ ⁠… No one, then, would be able to say that she had never seen the sea of Penelope, the Mother of the Gracchi, Delia, Lesbia, Nausicaa, Sappho.⁠ ⁠… + 

“Saepe te in somnis vidi!” + 

She said: + 

“Good⁠ ⁠… God!” + 

Not in the least with a Cockney intonation but like a good Tory English gentleman confronted by an unspeakable proposition. Well: it was an unspeakable proposition. For the voice from the telephone had been saying to her inattention, rather crawlingly, after no end of details as to the financial position of the house of Macmaster: + 

“So I thought, my dear Val, in remembrance of old times; that⁠ ⁠… If in short I were the means of bringing you together again.⁠ ⁠… For I believe you have not been corresponding.⁠ ⁠… You might in return.⁠ ⁠… You can see for yourself that at this moment the sum would be absolutely crushing.⁠ ⁠…” + 

II + 

Ten minutes later she was putting to Miss Wanostrocht, firmly if without ferocity, the question: + 

“Look here, Head, what did that woman say to you. I don’t like her; I don’t approve of her and I didn’t really listen to her. But I want to hear!” + 

Miss Wanostrocht, who had been taking her thin, black cloth coat from its peg behind the highly varnished pitch-pine door of her own private cell, flushed, hung up her garment again and turned from the door. She stood, thin, a little rigid, a little flushed, faded and a little as it were at bay. + 

“You must remember,” she began, “that I am a schoolmistress.” She pressed, with a gesture she constantly had, the noticeably golden plait of her dun-coloured hair with the palm of her thin left hand. None of the gentlewomen of that school had had quite enough to eat⁠—for years now. “It’s,” she continued, “an instinct to accept any means of knowledge. I like you so much, Valentine⁠—if in private you’ll let me call you that. And it seemed to me that if you were in⁠ ⁠…” + 

“In what?” Valentine asked, “Danger?⁠ ⁠… Trouble?” + 

“You understand,” Miss Wanostrocht replied, “That⁠ ⁠… person seemed as anxious to communicate to me facts about yourself as to give you⁠—that was her ostensible reason for ringing you up⁠—news About a⁠ ⁠… another person. With whom you once had⁠ ⁠… relations. And who has reappeared.” + 

“Ah,” Valentine heard herself exclaim. “He has reappeared, has he? I gathered as much.” She was glad to be able to keep herself under control to that extent. + 

Perhaps she did not have to trouble. She could not say that she felt changed from what she had been⁠—just before ten minutes ago, by the reappearance of a man she hoped she had put out of her mind. A man who had “insulted” her. In one way or the other he had insulted her! + 

But probably all her circumstances had changed. Before Edith Ethel had uttered her impossible sentence in that instrument her complete prospects had consisted of no more than the family picnic, under fig-trees, beside an unusually blue sea⁠—and the prospect had seemed as near⁠—as near as kiss your finger! Mother in black and purple; mother’s secretary in black without adornments. Brother? Oh, a romantic figure; slight, muscular, in white flannels with a Leghorn hat and⁠—well, why not be romantic over one’s brother⁠—with a broad scarlet sash. One foot on shore and one⁠ ⁠… in a light skiff that gently bobbed in the lapping tide. Nice boy; nice little brother. Lately employed nautically, so up to managing a light skiff. They were going tomorrow⁠ ⁠… but why not that very afternoon by the 4:20? + 

“They’d got the ships, they’d got the men, + 

They’d got the money too!” + 

Thank goodness they’d got the money! + 

The ships, Charing Cross to Vallambrosa, would no doubt run in a fortnight. The men⁠—the porters⁠—would also be released. You can’t travel in any comfort with mother, mother’s secretary and brother⁠—with your whole world and its baggage⁠—without lots of porters.⁠ ⁠… Talk about rationed butter! What was that to trying to get on without porters? + 

Once having begun it her mind went on singing the old eighteen-fiftyish, or seventy-ish, martial, British, anti-Russian patriotic song that one of her little friends had unearthed lately⁠—to prove the historic ferocity of his countrymen: + 

“We’ve fought the Bear before, + 

And so we will again! + 

The Russians shall not have Constantino⁠ ⁠…” + 

She exclaimed suddenly: “Oh!” + 

She had been about to say: “Oh, Hell!” but the sudden recollection that the War had been over a quarter of an hour made her leave it at “Oh!” You would have to drop wartime phraseology! You became again a Young Lady. Peace, too, has its Defence of the Realm Acts. Nevertheless, she has been thinking of the man who had once insulted her as the Bear, whom she would have to fight again! But with warm generosity she said: + 

“It’s a shame to call him the Bear!” Nevertheless he was⁠—the man who was said to have “reappeared”⁠—with his problems and all, something devouring.⁠ ⁠… Overwhelming, with rolling grey shoulders that with their intolerable problems pushed you and your own problems out of the road.⁠ ⁠… + 

She had been thinking all that whilst still in the School Hall, before she had gone to see the Head: immediately after Edith Ethel, Lady Macmaster had uttered the intolerable sentence. + 

She had gone on thinking there for a long time.⁠ ⁠… Ten minutes! + 

She formulated for herself summarily the first item of a period of nasty worries of a time she flattered herself she had nearly forgotten. Years ago, Edith Ethel, out of a clear sky, had accused her of having had a child by that man. But she hardly thought of him as a man. She thought of him as a ponderous, grey, intellectual mass who now, presumably, was mooning, obviously dotty, since he did not recognise the porter, behind the closed shutters of an empty house in Lincoln’s Inn.⁠ ⁠… Nothing less, I assure you! She had never been in that house, but she figured him, with cracks of light coming between the shutters, looking back over his shoulder at you in the doorway, grey, super-ursine.⁠ ⁠… Ready to envelop you in suffocating bothers! + 

She wondered how long it had been since the egregious Edith Ethel had made that assertion⁠ ⁠… with, naturally, every appearance of indignation for the sake of the man’s Wife with whom, equally naturally, Edith Ethel had “sided.” (Now she was trying to “bring you together again.”⁠ ⁠… The Wife, presumably, did not go to Edith Ethel’s tea-parties often enough, or was too brilliantly conspicuous when there. Probably the latter!)⁠ ⁠… How many years ago? Two? Not so much! Eighteen months, then? Surely more!⁠ ⁠… surely, surely more!⁠ ⁠… When you thought of Time in those days your mind wavered impotently like eyes tired by reading too small print.⁠ ⁠… He went out surely in the autumn of⁠ ⁠… No, it had been the first time he went that he went in the autumn. It was her brother’s friend, Ted, that went in ’16. Or the other⁠ ⁠… Malachi. So many goings out and returnings: and goings out and perhaps not returning. Or only in bits: the nose gone⁠ ⁠… or both eyes. Or⁠—or, Hell! oh, Hell! and she clenched her fists, her nails into her palms⁠—no mind! + 

You’d think it must be that from what Edith Ethel had said. He hadn’t recognised the porter: he was reported to have no furniture. Then⁠ ⁠… She remembered.⁠ ⁠… + 

She was then⁠—ten minutes before she interviewed Miss Wanostrocht; ten seconds after she had been blown out of the mouth of the telephone⁠—sitting on a varnished pitch-pine bench that had black iron, clamped legs against the plaster wall, non-conformishistically distempered in torpedo-grey; and she had thought all that in ten seconds.⁠ ⁠… But that had been really how it had been! + 

The minute Edith Ethel had finished saying the words: + 

“The sum would be absolutely crushing.⁠ ⁠…” Valentine had realised that she had been talking about a debt owed by her miserable husband to the one human being she, Valentine, could not bear to think about. It had naturally at the same moment flashed upon her that Edith Ethel had been giving her his news: He was in new troubles: broken down, broken up, broke to the wide.⁠ ⁠… Anything in the world but broken in.⁠ ⁠… But broken⁠ ⁠… And alone.⁠ ⁠… And calling for her! + 

She could not afford⁠—she could not bear!⁠—to recall even his name or to so much as bring up before her mind, into which, nevertheless, they were continually forcing themselves, his grey-blond face, his clumsy, square, reliable feet; his humpish bulk; his calculatedly wooden expression; his perfectly overwhelming, but authentic omniscience.⁠ ⁠… His masculinity. His⁠ ⁠… his Frightfulness! + 

Now, through Edith Ethel⁠—you would have thought that even he would have found someone more appropriate⁠—he was calling to her again to enter into the suffocating web of his imbroglios. Not even Edith Ethel would have dared to speak to her again of him without his having taken the first step.⁠ ⁠… + 

It was unthinkable; it was intolerable; and it had been as if she had been lifted off her feet and deposited on that bench against the wall by the mere sound of the offer.⁠ ⁠… What was the offer? + 

“I thought that you might, if I were the means of bringing you together⁠ ⁠…” She might⁠ ⁠… what? + 

Intercede with that man, that grey mass not to enforce the pecuniary claim that it had against Sir Vincent Macmaster. No doubt she and⁠ ⁠… the grey mass!⁠ ⁠… would then be allowed the Macmaster drawing-room to⁠ ⁠… to discuss the ethics of the day in! Just like that! + 

She was still breathless; the telephone continued to quack. She wished it would stop but she felt too weak to get up and hang the receiver on its hook. She wished it would stop; it gave her the feeling that a strand of Edith Ethel’s hair, say, was penetrating nauseously to her torpedo grey cloister. Something like that! + 

The grey mass never would enforce its pecuniary claim.⁠ ⁠… Those people had sponged mercilessly on him for years and years without ever knowing the kind of object upon which they sponged. It made them the more pitiful. For it was pitiful to clamour to be allowed to become a pimp in order to evade debts that would never be reclaimed.⁠ ⁠… + 

Now, in the empty rooms at Lincoln’s Inn⁠—for that was probably what it came to!⁠—that man was a grey ball of mist; a grey bear rolling tenebrously about an empty room with closed shutters. A grey problem! Calling to her! + 

A hell of a lot.⁠ ⁠… Beg pardon, she meant a remarkably great deal!⁠ ⁠… to have thought of in ten seconds! Eleven, by now, probably. Later she realised that that was what thought was. In ten minutes after large, impassive arms had carried you away from a telephone and deposited you on a clamped bench against a wall of the peculiar coldness of torpedo-grey distempered plaster, the sort of thing rejoiced in by Great Public (Girls’) Schools⁠ ⁠… in those ten minutes you found you thought out more than in two years. Or it was not as long ago as that. + 

Perhaps that was not astonishing. If you had not thought about, say, washable distemper for two years and then thought about it for ten minutes you could think a hell of a lot about it in those ten minutes. Probably all there was to think. Still, of course, washable distemper was not like the poor⁠—always with you. At least it always was in those cloisters, but not spiritually. On the other hand you always were with yourself! + 

But perhaps you were not always with yourself spiritually; you went on explaining how to breathe without thinking of how the life you were leading was influencing your⁠ ⁠… What? Immortal soul? Aura? Personality?⁠ ⁠… Something! + 

Well, for two years.⁠ ⁠… Oh, call it two years, for goodness’ sake, and get it over!⁠ ⁠… she must have been in⁠ ⁠… well, call that a “state of suspended animation” and get that over too! A sort of what they called inhibition. She had been inhibiting⁠—prohibiting⁠—herself from thinking about herself. Well, hadn’t she been right? What had a b⁠⸺⁠y Pro-German to think about in an embattled, engrossed, clamouring nation: especially when she had not much liked her brother-Pro’s! A solitary state, only to be dissolved by⁠ ⁠… maroons! In suspension! + 

But⁠ ⁠… Be conscientious with yourself, my good girl! When that telephone blew you out of its mouth you knew really that for two years you had been avoiding wondering whether you had not been insulted! Avoiding wondering that. And nothing else! No other qualified thing! + 

She had, of course, been, not in suspension, but in suspense. Because, if he made a sign⁠—“I understand,” Edith Ethel had said, “that you have not been in correspondence”⁠ ⁠… or had it been “in communication” that she had said?⁠ ⁠… Well, they hadn’t been either.⁠ ⁠… + 

Anyhow, if that grey Problem, that ravelled ball of grey knitting worsted, had made a sign she would have known that she had not been insulted. Or was there any sense in that? + 

Was it really true that if a male and female of the same species were alone in a room together and the male didn’t⁠ ⁠… then it was an insult? That was an idea that did not exist in a girl’s head without someone to put it there, but once it had been put there it became a luminous veracity! It had been put into her, Valentine Wannop’s head, naturally by Edith Ethel, who equally naturally said that she did not believe it, but that it was a tenet of⁠ ⁠… oh, the man’s wife! Of the idle, surpassing-the-Lily-and-Solomon-too, surprisingly svelte, tall, clean-run creature who forever on the shiny paper of illustrated journals advanced towards you with improbable strides along the railings of the Row, laughing, in company with the Honourable Somebody, second son of Lord Someone-or-other.⁠ ⁠… Edith Ethel was more refined. She had a title, whereas the other hadn’t, but she was pensive. She showed you that she had read Walter Savage Landor, and had only very lately given up wearing opaque amber beads, as affected by the later pre-Raphaelites. She was practically never in the illustrated papers, but she held more refined views. She held that there were some men who were not like that⁠—and those, all of them, were the men to whom Edith Ethel accorded the entrée to her Afternoons. She was their Egeria! A refining influence! + 

The Husband of the Wife then? Once he had been allowed in Edith Ethel’s drawing-room: now he wasn’t!⁠ ⁠… Must have deteriorated! + 

She said to herself sharply, in her “No nonsense, there” mood: + 

“Chuck it. You’re in love with a married man who’s a Society wife and you’re upset because the Titled Lady has put into your head the idea that you might ‘come together again.’ After ten years!” + 

But immediately she protested: + 

“No. No. No! It isn’t that. It’s all right the habit of putting things incisively, but it’s misleading to put things too crudely.” + 

What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing, on the face of it, but being dragged again into that man’s intolerable worries as unfortunate machinists are dragged into wheels by belts⁠—and all the flesh torn off their bones! Upon her word that had been her first thought. She was afraid, afraid, afraid! She suddenly appreciated the advantages of nunlike seclusion. Besides she wanted to be bashing policemen with bladders in celebration of Eleven Eleven! + 

That fellow⁠—he had no furniture; he did not appear to recognise the hall porter.⁠ ⁠… Dotty. Dotty and too morally deteriorated to be admitted to drawing-room of titled lady, the frequenters of which could be trusted not to make love to you on insufficient provocation, if left alone with you.⁠ ⁠… + 

Her generous mind reacted painfully. + 

“Oh, that’s not fair!” she said. + 

There were all sorts of sides to the unfairness. Before this War, and, of course, before he had lent all his money to Vincent Macmaster that⁠—that grey grizzly had been perfectly fit for the country-parsonage drawing-room of Edith Ethel Duchemin: he had been welcomed there with effusion!⁠ ⁠… After the War and when his money was⁠—presumably exhausted, and his mind exhausted, for he had no furniture and did not know the porter.⁠ ⁠… After the War, then, and when his money was exhausted he was not fit for the Salon of Lady Macmaster⁠—the only Lady to have a Salon in London. + 

It was what you called kicking down your ladder! + 

Obviously it had to be done. There were such a lot of these bothering War heroes that if you let them all into your Salon it would cease to be a Salon, particularly if you were under obligations to them!⁠ ⁠… That was already a pressing national problem: it was going to become an overwhelming one now⁠—in twenty minutes time; after those maroons. The impoverished War Heroes would all be coming back. Innumerable. You would have to tell your parlourmaid that you weren’t at home to⁠ ⁠… about seven million! + 

But wait a minute.⁠ ⁠… Where did they just stand? + 

He.⁠ ⁠… But she could not go on calling him just “he” like a schoolgirl of eighteen, thinking of her favourite actor⁠ ⁠… in the purity of her young thoughts. What was she to call him? She had never⁠—even when they had known each other⁠—called him anything other than Mr. So-and-So.⁠ ⁠… She could not bring herself to let her mental lips frame his name.⁠ ⁠… She had never used anything but his surname to this grey thing, familiar object of her mother’s study, seen frequently at tea-parties.⁠ ⁠… Once she had been out with it for a whole night in a dog cart! Think of that!⁠ ⁠… And they had spouted Tibullus one to another in moonlit mist. And she had certainly wanted it to kiss her⁠—in the moonlit mists a practically, a really completely strange bear! + 

It couldn’t be done, of course, but she remembered still how she had shivered.⁠ ⁠… Ph⁠ ⁠… Ph⁠ ⁠… Ph.⁠ ⁠… Shivering. + 

She shivered. + 

Afterwards they had been run into by the car of General Lord Edward Campion, V.C., P.G. Heaven knows what! Godfather of the man’s Society Wife, then taking the waters in Germany.⁠ ⁠… Or perhaps not her Godfather. The man’s rather; but her especial champion, in shining armour. In these days they had worn broad red stripes down the outsides of their trousers, Generals. What a change! How significant of the times! + 

That had been in 1912.⁠ ⁠… Say the first of July; she could not remember exactly. Summer weather, anyhow, before haymaking or just about. The grass had been long in Hoggs’s Forty Acre, when they had walked through it, discussing Woman’s Suffrage. She had brushed the seed-tops of the heavy grass with her hands as they walked.⁠ ⁠… Say the 1/7/12. + 

Now it was Eleven Eleven.⁠ ⁠… What? Oh, Eighteen, of course! + 

Six years ago! What changes in the world! What cataclysms! What Revolutions!⁠ ⁠… She heard all the newspapers, all the halfpenny paper journalists in creation crying in chorus! + 

But hang it: it was true! If, six years ago she had kissed the⁠ ⁠… the greyish lacuna of her mind then sitting beside her on the dogcart seat it would have been the larkish freak of a schoolgirl: if she did it today⁠—as per invitation presumably of Lady Macmaster, bringing them together, for, of course, it could not be performed from a distance or without correspondence⁠—No, communication!⁠ ⁠… If, then, she did it today⁠ ⁠… today⁠ ⁠… today⁠—the Eleven Eleven!⁠—Oh, what a day today would be.⁠ ⁠… Not her sentiments those; quotation from Christina, sister of Lady Macmaster’s favourite poet.⁠ ⁠… Or, perhaps, since she had had a title she would have found poets more⁠ ⁠… more chic! The poet who was killed at Gallipoli⁠ ⁠… Gerald Osborne, was it? Couldn’t remember the name! + 

But for six years then she had been a member of that⁠ ⁠… triangle. You couldn’t call it a ménage à trois, even if you didn’t know French. They hadn’t lived together!⁠ ⁠… They had d⁠⸺⁠d near died together when the general’s car hit their dogcart! D⁠⸺⁠d near! (You must not use those Wartime idioms. Do break yourself of it! Remember the maroons!) + 

An oafish thing to do! To take a schoolgirl, just⁠ ⁠… oh, just past the age of consent, out all night in a dogcart and then get yourself run into by the car of the V.C., P.G., champion-in-red-trouser-stripe of your Legitimate! You’d think any man who was a man would have avoided that! + 

Most men knew enough to know that the Woman Pays⁠ ⁠… the schoolgirl too! + 

But they get it both ways.⁠ ⁠… Look here: when Edith Ethel Duchemin, then, just⁠—or perhaps not quite, Lady Macmaster! At any rate, her husband was dead and she had just married that miserable little.⁠ ⁠… (Mustn’t use that word!) She, Valentine Wannop, had been the only witness of the marriage⁠—as of the previous, discreet, but so praiseworthy adultery!⁠ ⁠… When, then, Edith Ethel had.⁠ ⁠… It must have been on the very day of the knighthood, because Edith Ethel made it an excuse not to ask her to the resultant Party.⁠ ⁠… Edith Ethel had accused her of having had a baby by⁠ ⁠… oh, Mr. So-and-So.⁠ ⁠… And heaven was her, Valentine Wannop’s, witness that, although Mr. So-and-So was her mother’s constant adviser, she, Valentine Wannop, was still in such a state of acquaintance with him that she still called him by his surname.⁠ ⁠… When Lady Macmaster, spitting like the South American beast of burden called a llama, had accused her of having had a baby by her mother’s adviser⁠—to her natural astonishment, but, of course, it had been the result of the dogcart and the motor and the General, and the general’s sister, Lady Pauline Something⁠—or perhaps it was Claudine? Yes, Lady Claudine!⁠—who had been in the car and the Society Wife, who was always striding along the railings of the Row.⁠ ⁠… When she had been so accused out of the blue, her first thought⁠—and, confound it, her enduring thought!⁠—had not been concern for her own reputation but for his.⁠ ⁠… + 

That was the quality of his entanglements, their very essence. He got into appalling messes, unending and unravellable⁠—no, she meant ununravellable!⁠—messes and other people suffered for him whilst he mooned on⁠—into more messes! The General charging the dogcart was symbolical of him. He was perfectly on his right side and all, but it was like him to be in a dogcart when flagitious automobiles carrying Generals were running amuck! Then⁠ ⁠… the Woman Paid!⁠ ⁠… She really did, in this case. It had been her mother’s horse they had been driving and, although they had got damages out of the General, the costs were twice that.⁠ ⁠… And her, Valentine’s reputation had suffered from being in a dogcart at dawn, alone with a man.⁠ ⁠… It made no odds that he had⁠—or was it hadn’t?⁠—“insulted” her in any way all through that⁠—oh, that delicious, delirious night.⁠ ⁠… She had to be said to have a baby by him, and then she had to be dreadfully worried about his poor old reputation.⁠ ⁠… Of course it would have been pretty rotten of him⁠—she so young and innocent, daughter of so preposterously eminent, if so impoverished a man, his father’s best friend and all. “He hadn’t oughter’er done it!” He hadn’t really oughter.⁠ ⁠… She heard them all saying it, still! + 

Well, he hadn’t!⁠ ⁠… But she? + 

That magic night. It was just before dawn, the mists nearly up to their necks as they drove; the sky going pale in a sort of twilight. And one immense star! She remembered only one immense star, though, historically, there had been also a dilapidated sort of moon. But the star was her best boy⁠—what her wagon was hitched on to.⁠ ⁠… And they had been quoting⁠—quarrelling over, she remembered: + 

“Flebis et arsuro me, Delia, lecto + 

Tristibus et.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She exclaimed suddenly: + 

“Twilight and evening star + 

And one clear call for me + 

And may there be no moaning at the bar + 

When I.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She said: + 

“Oh, but you oughtn’t to, my dear! That’s Tennyson!” Tennyson, with a difference! + 

She said: + 

“All the same, that would have been an inexperienced schoolgirl’s prank.⁠ ⁠… But if I let him kiss me now I should be.⁠ ⁠…” She would be a what was it⁠ ⁠… a fornicatress?⁠ ⁠… trix! Fornicatrix is preferable! Very preferable. Then why not adultrix? You couldn’t: you had to be a “cold-blooded adultress!” or morality was not avenged. + 

Oh; but surely not cold-blooded!⁠ ⁠… Deliberate, then!⁠ ⁠… That wasn’t, either, the word for the process. Of osculation!⁠ ⁠… Comic things, words, as applied to states of feelings! + 

But if she went now to Lincoln’s Inn and the Problem held out its arms.⁠ ⁠… That would be “Deliberate.” It would be asking for it in the fullest sense of the term. + 

She said to herself quickly: + 

“This way madness lies!” And then: + 

“What an imbecile thing to say!” + 

She had had an Affair with a man, she made her mind say to her, two years ago. That was all right. There could not be a, say, a schoolmistress rising twenty-four or twenty-five, in the world who hadn’t had some affair, even if it were no more than a gentleman in a teashop who every afternoon for a week had gazed at her disrespectfully over a slice of plumcake.⁠ ⁠… And then disappeared.⁠ ⁠… But you had to have had at least a might-have-been or you couldn’t go on being a schoolmistress or a girl in a ministry or a dactylographer of respectability. You packed that away in the bottom of your mind and on Sunday mornings before the perfectly insufficient Sunday dinner, you took it out and built castles in Spain in which you were a castanetted heroine turning on wonderful hips, but casting behind you inflaming glances.⁠ ⁠… Something like that! + 

Well, she had had an affair with this honest, simple creature! So good! So unspeakably good.⁠ ⁠… Like the late Albert, prince consort! The very, helpless, immobile sort of creature that she ought not to have tempted. It had been like shooting tame pigeons! Because he had had a Society wife always in the illustrated papers whilst he sat at home and evolved Statistics or came to tea with her dear, tremendous, distracted mother, whom he helped to get her articles accurate. So a woman tempted him and he did.⁠ ⁠… No; he didn’t quite eat! + 

But why?⁠ ⁠… Because he was good? + 

Very likely! + 

Or was it⁠—That was the intolerable thought that she shut up within her along with the material for castles in the air!⁠—was it because he had been really indifferent? + 

They had revolved round each other at tea-parties⁠—or rather he had revolved around her, because at Edith Ethel’s affairs she always sat, a fixed starlet, behind the tea-urn and dispensed cups. But he would moon round the room, looking at the backs of books; occasionally laying down the law to some guest; and always drifting in the end to her side where he would say a trifle or two.⁠ ⁠… And the beautiful⁠—the quite excruciatingly beautiful wife⁠—striding along the Row with the second son of the Earl of someone at her side.⁠ ⁠… Asking for it.⁠ ⁠… + 

So it had been from the 1/7/12, say to the 4/8/14! + 

After that, things had become more rubbled⁠—mixed up with alarums. Excursions on his part to unapproved places. And trouble. He was quite damnably in trouble. With his Superiors; with, so unnecessarily, Hun projectiles, wire, mud; over Money; politics; mooning on without a good word from anyone.⁠ ⁠… Unravellable muddles that never got unravelled but that somehow got you caught up in them.⁠ ⁠… + 

Because he needed her moral support! When, during the late Hostilities, he hadn’t been out there, he had drifted to the tea-table much earlier of an afternoon and stayed beside it much longer: till after everyone else had gone and they could go and sit on the tall fender side by side, and argue⁠ ⁠… about the rights and wrongs of the War! + 

Because she was the only soul in the world with whom he could talk.⁠ ⁠… They had the same sort of good, bread-and-butter brains; without much of the romantic.⁠ ⁠… No doubt a touch⁠ ⁠… in him. Otherwise he would not have always been in these muddles. He gave all he possessed to anyone who asked for it. That was all right. But that those who sponged on him should also involve him in intolerable messes.⁠ ⁠… That was not proper. One ought to defend oneself against that! + 

Because⁠ ⁠… if you do not defend yourself against that, look how you let in your nearest and dearest⁠—those who have to sympathise with you in your confounded troubles whilst you moon on, giving away more and more and getting into more troubles! In this case it was she who was his Nearest and Dearest.⁠ ⁠… Or had been! + 

At that her nerves suddenly got the better of her and her mind went mad.⁠ ⁠… Supposing that that fellow, from whom she had not heard for two years, hadn’t now communicated with her.⁠ ⁠… Like an ass she had taken it for granted that he had asked Lady⁠ ⁠… Blast her!⁠ ⁠… to “bring them together again”! She had imagined that even Edith Ethel would not have had the cheek to ring her up if he hadn’t asked her to! + 

But she had nothing to go on.⁠ ⁠… Feeble, oversexed ass that she was, she had let her mind jump at once to the conclusion, the moment the mere mention of him seemed implied⁠—jump to the conclusion that he was asking her again to come and be his mistress.⁠ ⁠… Or nurse him through his present muddle till he should be fit to.⁠ ⁠… + 

Mind, she did not say that she would have succumbed. But if she had not jumped at the idea that it was he, really, speaking through Edith Ethel, she would never have permitted her mind to dwell on⁠ ⁠… on his blasted, complacent perfections! + 

Because she had taken it for granted that if he had had her rung up he would not have been monkeying with other girls during the two years he hadn’t written to her.⁠ ⁠… Ah, but hadn’t he? + 

Look here! Was it reasonable? Here was a fellow who had all but⁠ ⁠… all but⁠ ⁠… “taken advantage of her” one night just before going out to France, say, two years ago.⁠ ⁠… And not another word from him after that!⁠ ⁠… It was all very well to say that he was portentous, looming, luminous, loony: John Peel with his coat so grey, the English Country Gentleman pur sang and then some; saintly; Godlike, Jesus-Christ-like.⁠ ⁠… He was all that. But you don’t seduce, as near as can be, a young woman and then go off to Hell, leaving her, God knows, in Hell, and not so much as send her, in two years, a picture-postcard with mizpah on it. You don’t. You don’t! + 

Or if you do you have to have your character revised. You have to have it taken for granted that you were only monkeying with her and that you’ve been monkeying ever since with WAACS in Rouen or some other Base.⁠ ⁠… + 

Of course, if you ring your young woman up when you come back⁠ ⁠… or have her rung up by a titled lady.⁠ ⁠… That might restore you in the eyes of the world, or at least in the eyes of the young woman if she was a bit of a softie.⁠ ⁠… + 

But had he? Had he? It was absurd to think that Edith Ethel hadn’t had the face to do it unasked! To save three thousand two hundred pounds, not to mention interest⁠—which was what Vincent owed him!⁠—Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying.⁠ ⁠… She was quite right. She had to save her man. You go to any depths of ignominy to save your man. + 

But that did not help her, Valentine Wannop! + 

She sprang off the bench; she clenched her nails into her palms; she stamped her thin-soled shoes into the coke-brise floor that was singularly unresilient. She exclaimed: + 

“Damn it all, he didn’t ask her to ring me up. He didn’t ask her to. He didn’t ask her to!” still stamping about. + 

She marched straight at the telephone that was by now uttering long, tinny, nightjar’s calls and, with one snap, pulled the receiver right off the twisted, green-blue cord.⁠ ⁠… Broke it! With incidental satisfaction. + 

Then she said: + 

“Steady the Buffs!” not out of repentance for having damaged School Property, but because she was accustomed to call her thoughts The Buffs because of their practical, unromantic character as a rule.⁠ ⁠… A fine regiment, the Buffs! + 

Of course, if she had not broken the telephone she could have rung up Edith Ethel and have asked her whether he had or hadn’t asked to⁠ ⁠… to be brought together again.⁠ ⁠… It was like her, Valentine Wannop, to smash the only means of resolving a torturing doubt.⁠ ⁠… + 

It wasn’t, really, in the least like her. She was practical enough: none of the “under the ban of fatality” business about her. She had smashed the telephone because it had been like smashing a connection with Edith Ethel; or because she hated tinny nightjars; or because she had smashed it. For nothing in the world; for nothing, nothing, nothing in the world would she ever ring up Edith Ethel and ask her: + 

“Did he put you up to ringing me up?” + 

That would be to let Edith Ethel come between their intimacy. + 

A subconscious volition was directing her feet towards the great doors at the end of the Hall, varnished, pitch-pine doors of Gothic architecture; economically decorated as if with straps and tin-lids of Brunswick-blacked cast iron. + 

She said: + 

“Of course if it’s his wife who has removed his furniture that would be a reason for his wanting to get into communication. They would have split.⁠ ⁠… But he does not hold with a man divorcing a woman, and she won’t divorce.” + 

As she went through the sticky postern⁠—All that woodwork seemed sticky on account of its varnish!⁠—beside the great doors she said: + 

“Who cares!” + 

The great thing was⁠ ⁠… but she could not formulate what the great thing was. You had to settle the preliminaries. + 

III + 

She said eventually to Miss Wanostrocht who had sat down at her table behind two pink carnations: + 

“I didn’t consciously want to bother you but a spirit in my feet has led me who knows how.⁠ ⁠… That’s Shelley, isn’t it?” + 

And indeed a quite unconscious but shrewd mind had pointed out to her whilst still in the School Hall and even before she had broken the telephone, that Miss Wanostrocht very probably would be able to tell her what she wanted to know and that if she didn’t hurry she might miss her, since the Head would probably go now the girls were gone. So she had hurried through gauntish corridors whose Decorated Gothic windows positively had bits of pink glass here and there interspersed in their lattices. Nevertheless a nearly deserted, darkish, locker-lined dressing-room being a shortcut, she had paused in it before the figure of a clumsyish girl, freckled, in black and, on a stool, desultorily lacing a dull black boot, an ankle on her knee. She felt an impulse to say: “Goodbye, Pettigul!” she didn’t know why. + 

The clumsy, fifteenish, bumpy-faced girl was a symbol of that place⁠—healthyish, but not over healthy; honestish but with no craving for intellectual honesty; big-boned in unexpected places⁠ ⁠… and uncomelily blubbering so that her face appeared dirtyish.⁠ ⁠… It was in fact all “ishes” about that Institution. They were all healthyish, honestish, clumsyish, twelve-to-eighteenish and big-boned in unexpected places because of the late insufficient feeding.⁠ ⁠… Emotionalish, too; apt to blubber rather than to go into hysterics. + 

Instead of saying goodbye to the girl she said: + 

“Here!” and roughly, since she was exhibiting too much leg, pulled down the girl’s shortish skirt and set to work to lace the unyielding boot on the unyielding shinbone.⁠ ⁠… After a period of youthful bloom, which would certainly come and as certainly go, this girl would, normally, find herself one of the Mothers of Europe, marriage being due to the period of youthful bloom.⁠ ⁠… Normally that is to say according to a normality that that day might restore. Of course it mightn’t! + 

A tepid drop of moisture fell on Valentine’s right knuckle. + 

“My cousin Bob was killed the day before yesterday,” the girl’s voice said above her head. Valentine bent her head still lower over the boot with the patience that, in educational establishments, you must, if you want to be businesslike and shrewd, acquire and display in face of unusual mental vagaries.⁠ ⁠… This girl had never had a cousin Bob, or anything else. Pettigul and her two sisters, Pettiguls Two and Three, were all in that Institution at extremely reduced rates precisely because they had not got, apart from their widowed mother, a discoverable relative. The father, a half-pay major, had been killed early in the war. All the mistresses had had to hand in reports on the moral qualities of the Pettiguls, so all the mistresses had this information. + 

“He gave me his puppy to keep for him before he went out,” the girl said. “It doesn’t seem just!” + 

Valentine, straightening herself, said: + 

“I should wash my face if I were you, before I went out. Or you might get yourself taken for a German!” She pulled the girl’s clumsyish blouse straight on her shoulders. + 

“Try,” she added, “to imagine that you’ve got someone just come back! It’s just as easy and it will make you look more attractive!” + 

Scurrying along the corridors she said to herself: + 

“Heaven help me, does it make me look more attractive?” + 

She caught the Head, as she had anticipated, just on the point of going to her home in Fulham, an unattractive suburb but near a bishop’s palace nevertheless. It seemed somehow appropriate. The lady was episcopally-minded but experienced in the vicissitudes of suburban children: very astonishing some of them unless you took them very much in the lump. + 

Miss Head had stood behind her table for the first three questions and answers, in an attitude of someone who is a little at bay, but she had sat down just before Valentine had quoted her Shelley at her, and she had now the air of one who is ready to make a night of it. Valentine continued to stand. + 

“This,” Miss Wanostrocht said very gently, “is a day on which one might⁠ ⁠… take steps⁠ ⁠… that might influence one’s whole life.” + 

“That’s,” Valentine answered, “exactly why I’ve come to you. I want to know what that woman said to you so as to know where I stand before I take a step.” + 

The Head said: + 

“I had to let the girls go. I don’t mind saying that you are very valuable to me. The Governors⁠—I had an express from Lord Boulnois⁠—ordered them to be given a holiday tomorrow. It’s very inconsistent. But that makes it all the.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She stopped. Valentine said to herself: + 

“By Jove, I don’t know anything about men; but how little I know about women. What’s she getting at?” + 

She added: + 

“She’s nervous. She must be wanting to say something she thinks I won’t like!” + 

She said chivalrously: + 

“I don’t believe anybody could have kept those girls in today. It’s a thing one has no experience of. There’s never been a day like this before.” + 

Out there in Piccadilly there would be seething mobs shoulder to shoulder: she had never seen the Nelson column stand out of a solid mass. They might roast oxen whole in the Strand: Whitechapel would be seething, enamelled iron advertisements looking down on millions of bowler hats. All sordid and immense London stretched out under her gaze. She felt herself of London as the grouse feels itself of the heather, and there she was in an emptied suburb looking at two pink carnations. Dyed probably: offering of Lord Boulnois to Miss Wanostrocht! You never saw a natural-grown carnation that shade! + 

She said: + 

“I’d be glad to know what that woman⁠—Lady Macmaster⁠—told you.” + 

Miss Wanostrocht looked down at her hands. She had the little-fingers hooked together, the hands back to back; it was a demoded gesture.⁠ ⁠… Girton of 1897, Valentine thought. Indulged in by the thoughtfully blonde.⁠ ⁠… Fair girl graduates the sympathetic comic papers of those days had called them. It pointed to a long sitting. Well, she, Valentine, was not going to brusque the issue!⁠ ⁠… French-derived expression that. But how would you put it otherwise? + 

Miss Wanostrocht said: + 

“I sat at the feet of your father!” + 

“You see!” Valentine said to herself. “But she must then have gone to Oxford, not Newnham!” She could not remember whether there had been woman’s colleges at Oxford as early as 1895 or 1897. There must have been. + 

“The greatest Teacher.⁠ ⁠… The greatest influence in the world,” Miss Wanostrocht said. + 

It was queer, Valentine thought: This woman had known all about her⁠—at any rate all about her distinguished descent all the time she, Valentine, had been Physical Instructress at that Great Public School (Girls’). Yet except for an invariable courtesy such as she imagined Generals might show to noncommissioned officers, Miss Wanostrocht had hitherto taken no more notice of her than she might have taken of a superior parlourmaid. On the other hand she had let Valentine arrange her physical training exactly as she liked: without any interference. + 

“We used to hear,” Miss Wanostrocht said, “how he spoke Latin with you and your brother from the day of your births.⁠ ⁠… He used to be regarded as eccentric, but how right!⁠ ⁠… Miss Hall says that you are the most remarkable Latinist she has ever so much as imagined.” + 

“It’s not true,” Valentine said, “I can’t think in Latin. You cannot be a real Latinist unless you do that. He did of course.” + 

“It was the last thing you would think of him as doing,” the Head answered with a pale gleam of youth. “He was such a thorough man of the world. So awake!” + 

“We ought to be a queer lot, my brother and I,” Valentine said. “With such a father⁠ ⁠… And mother of course!” + 

Miss Wanostrocht said: + 

“Oh⁠ ⁠… your mother.⁠ ⁠…” + 

And immediately Valentine conjured up the little, adoring female clique of Miss Wanostrocht’s youth, all spying on her father and mother in their walks under the Oxford Sunday trees, the father so jaunty and awake, the mother so trailing, large, generous, unobservant. And all the little clique saying: If only he had us to look after him.⁠ ⁠… She said with a little malice: + 

“You don’t read my mother’s novels, I suppose.⁠ ⁠… It was she who did all my father’s writing for him. He couldn’t write, he was too impatient!” + 

Miss Wanostrocht exclaimed: + 

“Oh, you shouldn’t say that!” with almost the pain of someone defending her own personal reputation. + 

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” Valentine said. “He was the first person to say it about himself.” + 

“He shouldn’t have said it either,” Miss Wanostrocht answered with a sort of soft unction. “He should have taken care more of his own reputation for the sake of his Work!” + 

Valentine considered this thin, ecstatic spinster with ironic curiosity. + 

“Of course, if you’ve sat⁠ ⁠… if you’re still sitting at father’s feet as much as all that,” she conceded, “it gives you a certain right to be careful about his reputation.⁠ ⁠… All the same I wish you would tell me what that person said on the phone!” + 

The bust of Miss Wanostrocht moved with a sudden eagerness further towards the edge of her table. + 

“It’s precisely because of that,” she said, “that I want to speak to you first.⁠ ⁠… That I want you to consider.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Valentine said: + 

“Because of my father’s reputation.⁠ ⁠… Look here, did that person⁠—Lady Macmaster!⁠—speak to you as if you were me? Our names are near enough to make it possible.” + 

“You’re,” Miss Wanostrocht said, “as one might say, the fine fruit of the product of his views on the education of women. And if you⁠ ⁠… It’s been such a satisfaction to me to observe in you such a⁠ ⁠… a sound, instructed head on such a⁠ ⁠… oh, you know, sane body.⁠ ⁠… And then.⁠ ⁠… An earning capacity. A commercial value. Your father, of course, never minced words.⁠ ⁠…” She added: + 

“I’m bound to say that my interview with Lady Macmaster⁠ ⁠… Who surely isn’t a lady of whom you could say that you disapprove. I’ve read her husband’s work. It surely⁠—you’d say, wouldn’t you?⁠—conserves some of the ancient fire.” + 

“He,” Valentine said, “hasn’t a word of Latin to his tail. He makes his quotations out, if he uses them, by means of school-cribs.⁠ ⁠… I know his methods of work, you know.” + 

It occurred to Valentine to think that if Edith Ethel really had at first taken Miss Wanostrocht for herself there might pretty obviously be some cause for Miss Wanostrocht’s concern for her father’s reputation as an intimate trainer of young women. She figured Edith Ethel suddenly bursting into a description of the circumstances of that man who was without furniture and did not appear to recognise the porter. The relations she might have described as having existed between her and him might well worry the Head of a Great Public School for Middle Class Girls. She had no doubt been described as having had a baby. A disagreeable and outraged current invaded her feelings.⁠ ⁠… + 

It was suddenly obscured by a recrudescence of the thought that had come to her only incidentally in the hall. It rushed over her with extraordinary vividness now, like a wave of warm liquid.⁠ ⁠… If it had really been that fellow’s wife who had removed his furniture what was there to keep them apart? He couldn’t have pawned or sold or burnt his furniture whilst he had been with the British Expeditionary Force in the Low Countries! He couldn’t have without extraordinary difficulty! Then⁠ ⁠… What should keep them apart?⁠ ⁠… Middle Class Morality? A pretty gory carnival that had been for the last four years! Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not so hard as that, surely! So that if one hurried.⁠ ⁠… What on earth did she want, unknown to herself? + 

She heard herself saying, almost with a sob, so that she was evidently in a state of emotion: + 

“Look here: I disapprove of this whole thing: of what my father has brought me to! Those people⁠ ⁠… the brilliant Victorians talked all the time through their hats. They evolved a theory from anywhere and then went brilliantly mad over it. Perfectly recklessly.⁠ ⁠… Have you noticed Pettigul One?⁠ ⁠… Hasn’t it occurred to you that you can’t carry on violent physical jerks and mental work side by side? I ought not to be in this school and I ought not to be what I am!” + 

At Miss Wanostrocht’s perturbed expression she said to herself: + 

“What on earth am I saying all this for? You’d think I was trying to cut loose from this school! Am I?” + 

Nevertheless her voice was going on: + 

“There’s too much oxygenation of the lungs, here. It’s unnatural. It affects the brain, deleteriously. Pettigul One is an example of it. She’s earnest with me and earnest with her books. Now she’s gone dotty. Most of them it only stupefies.” + 

It was incredible to her that the mere imagination that that fellow’s wife had left him should make her spout out like this⁠—for all the world like her father spouting out one of his ingenious theories!⁠ ⁠… It had really occurred to her once or twice to think that you could not run a dual physical and mental existence without some risk. The military physical developments of the last four years had been responsible for a real exaggeration of physical values. She was aware that in that Institution, for the last four years, she had been regarded as supplementing if not as actually replacing both the doctor and the priest.⁠ ⁠… But from that to evolving a complete theory that the Pettigul’s lie was the product of an over-oxygenated brain was going pretty far.⁠ ⁠… + 

Still, she was prevented from taking part in national rejoicings; pretty certainly Edith Ethel had been talking scandal about her to Miss Wanostrocht. She had the right to take it out in some sort of exaggerated declamation! + 

“It appears,” Miss Wanostrocht said, “for we can’t now go into the question of the whole curriculum of the school, though I am inclined to agree with you. What by the by is the matter with Pettigul One? I thought her rather a solid sort of girl. But it appears that the wife of a friend⁠ ⁠… perhaps it’s only a former friend of yours, is in a nursing home.” + 

Valentine exclaimed: + 

“Oh, he.⁠ ⁠… But that’s too ghastly!” + 

“It appears,” Miss Wanostrocht said, “to be rather a mess.” She added: “That appears to be the only expression to use.” + 

For Valentine, that piece of news threw a blinding light upon herself. She was overwhelmingly appalled because that woman was in a nursing home. Because in that case it would not be sporting to go and see the husband! + 

Miss Wanostrocht went on: + 

“Lady Macmaster was anxious for your advice.⁠ ⁠… It appears that the only other person that could look after the interests of⁠ ⁠… of your friend: his brother⁠ ⁠…” + 

Valentine missed something out of that sentence. Miss Wanostrocht talked too fluently. If people wanted you to appreciate items of sledgehammering news they should not use long sentences. They should say: + 

“He’s mad and penniless. His brother’s dying: his wife’s just been operated on.” Like that! Then you could take it in; even if your mind was rioting about like a cat in a barrel. + 

“The brother’s⁠ ⁠… female companion,” Miss Wanostrocht was wandering on, “though it appears that she would have been willing is therefore not available.⁠ ⁠… The theory is that he⁠—he himself, your friend, has been considerably unhinged by his experiences in the war. Then.⁠ ⁠… Who in your opinion should take the responsibility of looking after his interests?” + 

Valentine heard herself say: + 

“Me!” + 

She added: + 

“Him! Looking after him. I don’t know that he has any⁠ ⁠… interests!” + 

He didn’t appear to have any furniture, so how could he have the other things. She wished Miss Wanostrocht would leave off using the word “appear.” It was irritating⁠ ⁠… and infectious. Could the lady not make a direct statement? But then, no one ever made clear statements and this no doubt appeared to that anæmic spinster a singularly tenebrous affair. + 

As for clear statements.⁠ ⁠… If there had ever been any in precisely this tenebrous mess she, Valentine, would know how she stood with that man’s wife. For it was part of the preposterous way in which she herself and all her friends behaved that they never made clear statements⁠—except for Edith Ethel who had the nature of a female costermonger and could not tell the truth, though she could be clear enough. But even Edith Ethel had never hitherto said anything about the way the wife in this case treated the husband. She had given Valentine very clearly to understand that she “sided” with the wife⁠—but she had never gone as far as to say that the wife was a good wife. If she⁠—Valentine⁠—could only know that. + 

Miss Wanostrocht was asking: + 

“When you say ‘Me,’ do you mean that you would propose to look after that man yourself? I trust not.” + 

… Because, obviously, if she were a good wife, she, Valentine couldn’t butt in⁠ ⁠… not generously. As her father’s and still more her mother’s daughter.⁠ ⁠… On the face of it you would say that a wife who was always striding along the palings of the Row, or the paths of other resorts of the fashionable could not be a good⁠—a domestic⁠—wife for a Statistician. On the other hand he was a pretty smart man, Governing class, county family and the rest of it⁠—so he might like his wife to figure in Society: he might even exact it. He was quite capable of that. Why, for all she knew, the wife might be a retiring, shy person whom he thrust out into the hard world. It was not likely: but it was as possible as anything else. + 

Miss Wanostrocht was asking: + 

“Aren’t there Institutions⁠ ⁠… Military Sanatoria⁠ ⁠… for cases precisely like that of this Captain Tietjens. It appears to be the war that has broken him down, not merely evil living.” + 

“It’s precisely,” Valentine said, “because of that that one should want⁠ ⁠… shouldn’t one.⁠ ⁠… Because it’s because of the War⁠ ⁠…” + 

The sentence would not finish itself. + 

Miss Wanostrocht said: + 

“I thought.⁠ ⁠… It has been represented to me⁠ ⁠… that you were a Pacifist. Of an extreme type!” + 

It had given Valentine a turn⁠—like the breaking out of sweat in a case of fever⁠—to hear the name, coldly: “Captain Tietjens,” for it was like a release. She had been irrationally determined that hers should not be the first tongue to utter that name. + 

And apparently from her tone Miss Wanostrocht was prepared to detest that Captain Tietjens. Perhaps she detested him already. + 

She was beginning to say: + 

“If one is an extreme Pacifist because one cannot bear to think of the sufferings of men isn’t that a precise reason why one should wish that a poor devil, all broken up⁠ ⁠…” + 

But Miss Wanostrocht had begun one of her own long sentences. Their voices went on together, like trains dragging along ballast⁠—disagreeably. Miss Wanostrocht’s organ, however, won out with the words: + 

“… behaved very badly indeed.” + 

Valentine said hotly: + 

“You ought not to believe anything of the sort⁠—on the strength of anything said by a woman like Lady Macmaster.” + 

Miss Wanostrocht appeared to have been brought to a complete stop: she leaned forward in her chair; her mouth was a little open. And Valentine said: “Thank Goodness!” to herself. + 

She had to have a moment to herself to digest what had the air of being new evidence of the baseness of Edith Ethel; she felt herself to be infuriated in regions of her own being that she hardly knew. That seemed to her to be a littleness in herself. She had not thought that she had been as little as that. It ought not to matter what people said of you. She was perfectly accustomed to think of Edith Ethel as telling whole crowds of people very bad things about her, Valentine Wannop. But there was about this a recklessness that was hardly believable. To tell an unknown person, encountered by chance on the telephone, derogatory facts about a third party who might be expected to come to the telephone herself in a minute or two⁠—and, not only that⁠—who must in all probability hear what had been said very soon after, from the first listener.⁠ ⁠… That was surely a recklessness of evil-speaking that almost outpassed sanity.⁠ ⁠… Or else it betrayed a contempt for her, Valentine Wannop, and what she could do in the way of reprisals that was extremely hard to bear! + 

She said suddenly to Miss Wanostrocht: + 

“Look here! Are you speaking to me as a friend to my father’s daughter or as a Headmistress to a Physical Instructor?” + 

A certain amount of blood came into the lady’s pinkish features. She had certainly been ruffled when Valentine had permitted her voice to sound so long alongside her own; for, although Valentine knew next to nothing about the Head’s likes or dislikes she had once or twice before seen her evince marked distaste on being interrupted in one of her formal sentences. + 

Miss Wanostrocht said with a certain coldness: + 

“I’m speaking at present.⁠ ⁠… I’m allowing myself the liberty⁠—as a much older woman⁠—in the capacity of a friend of your father. I have been, in short, trying to recall to you all that you owe to yourself as being an example of his training!” + 

Involuntarily Valentine’s lips formed themselves for a low whistle of incredulity. She said to herself: + 

“By Jove! I am in the middle of a nasty affair.⁠ ⁠… This is a sort of professional cross-examination.” + 

“I am in a way glad,” the lady was now continuing, “that you take that line.⁠ ⁠… I mean of defending Mrs. Tietjens with such heat against Lady Macmaster. Lady Macmaster appears to dislike Mrs. Tietjens, but I am bound to say that she appears to be in the right of it. I mean of her dislike. Lady Macmaster is a serious personality and, even on her public record Mrs. Tietjens appears to be very much the reverse. No doubt you wish to be loyal to your⁠ ⁠… friends, but⁠ ⁠…” + 

“We appear,” Valentine said, “to be getting into an extraordinary muddle.” + 

She added: + 

“I haven’t, as you seem to think, been defending Mrs. Tietjens. I would have. I would at any time. I have always thought of her as beautiful and kind. But I heard you say the words: ‘has been behaving very badly,’ and I thought you meant that Captain Tietjens had. I denied it. If you meant that his wife has, I deny it, too. She’s an admirable wife⁠ ⁠… and mother⁠ ⁠… that sort of thing, for all I know.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She said to herself: + 

“Now why do I say that? What’s Hecuba to me?” and then: + 

“It’s to defend his honour, of course⁠ ⁠… I’m trying to present Captain Tietjens as English Country Gentleman complete with admirably arranged establishment, stables, kennels, spouse, offspring⁠ ⁠… That’s a queer thing to want to do!” + 

Miss Wanostrocht who had breathed deeply said now: + 

“I’m extremely glad to hear that. Lady Macmaster certainly said that Mrs. Tietjens was⁠—let us say⁠—at least a neglectful wife.⁠ ⁠… Vain, you know; idle; overdressed.⁠ ⁠… All that⁠ ⁠… And you appeared to defend Mrs. Tietjens.” + 

“She’s a smart woman in smart Society,” Valentine said, “but it’s with her husband’s concurrence. She has a right to be.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“We shouldn’t,” Miss Wanostrocht said, “be in the extraordinary muddle to which you referred if you did not so continually interrupt me. I was trying to say that, for you, an inexperienced girl, brought up in a sheltered home, no pitfall could be more dangerous than a man with a wife who neglected her duties!” + 

Valentine said: + 

“You will have to excuse my interrupting you. It is, you know, rather more my funeral than yours.” + 

Miss Wanostrocht said quickly: + 

“You can’t say that. You don’t know how ardently.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Valentine said: + 

“Yes, yes.⁠ ⁠… Your schwaerm for my father’s memory and all.⁠ ⁠… But my father couldn’t bring it about that I should lead a sheltered life.⁠ ⁠… I’m about as experienced as any girl of the lower classes.⁠ ⁠… No doubt it was his doing, but don’t make any mistakes.” + 

She added: + 

“Still, it’s I that’s the corpse. You’re conducting the inquest. So it’s more fun for you.” + 

Miss Wanostrocht had grown slightly pale: + 

“I; if.⁠ ⁠…” she stammered slightly, “by ‘experience’ you mean.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I don’t,” Valentine exclaimed, “and you have no right to infer that I do on the strength of a conversation you’ve had, but shouldn’t have had, with one of the worst tongues in London.⁠ ⁠… I mean that my father left us so that I had to earn my and my mother’s living as a servant for some months after his death. That was what his training came to. But I can look after myself⁠ ⁠… In consequence.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Miss Wanostrocht had thrown herself back in her chair. + 

“But⁠ ⁠…” she exclaimed: she had grown completely pale⁠—like discoloured wax. “There was a subscription.⁠ ⁠… We.⁠ ⁠…” she began again: “We knew that he hadn’t.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You subscribed,” Valentine said, “to purchase his library and presented it to his wife⁠ ⁠… who had nothing to eat but what my wages as a tweeny maid got for her.” But before the pallor of the other lady she tried to add a touch of generosity: “Of course the subscribers wanted, very naturally, to preserve as much as they could of his personality. A man’s books are very much himself. That was all right.” She added: “All the same I had that training: in a suburban basement. So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In Ealing.” + 

Miss Wanostrocht said faintly: + 

“This is very dreadful!” + 

“It isn’t really!” Valentine said. “I wasn’t badly treated as tweeny maids go. It would have been better if the Mistress hadn’t been a constant invalid and the cook constantly drunk.⁠ ⁠… After that I did a little office work. For the suffragettes. That was after old Mr. Tietjens came back from abroad and gave mother some work on a paper he owned. We scrambled along then, somehow. Old Mr. Tietjens was father’s greatest friend, so father’s side, as you might say, turned up trumps⁠—If you like to think that to console you.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Miss Wanostrocht was bending her face down over her table, presumably to hide a little of it from Valentine or to avoid the girl’s eyes. + 

Valentine went on: + 

“One knows all about the conflict between a man’s private duties and his public achievements. But with a very little less of the flamboyant in his life my father might have left us very much better off. It isn’t what I want⁠—to be a cross between a sergeant in the army and an upper housemaid. Any more than I wanted to be an under one.” + 

Miss Wanostrocht uttered an “Oh!” of pain. She exclaimed rapidly: + 

“It was your moral rather than your mere athletic influence that made me so glad to have you here.⁠ ⁠… It was because I felt that you did not set such a high value on the physical.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Well, you aren’t going to have me here much longer,” Valentine said. “Not an instant more than I can in decency help. I’m going to.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She said to herself: + 

“What on earth am I going to do?⁠ ⁠… What do I want?” + 

She wanted to lie in a hammock beside a blue, tideless sea and think about Tibullus⁠ ⁠… There was no nonsense about her. She did not want to engage in intellectual pursuits herself. She had not the training. But she intended to enjoy the more luxurious forms of the intellectual products of others.⁠ ⁠… That appeared to be the moral of the day! + 

And, looking rather minutely at Miss Wanostrocht’s inclined face, she wondered if, in the history of the world, there had ever been such another day. Had Miss Wanostrocht, for instance, ever known what it was to have a man come back. Ah, but amid the tumult of a million other men coming back! A collective impulse to slacken off! Immense! Softening! + 

Miss Wanostrocht had apparently loved her father. No doubt in company with fifty damsels. Did they ever get a collective kick out of that affair? It was even possible that she had spoken as she had⁠ ⁠… pour cause. Warning her, Valentine, against the deleterious effect of being connected with a man whose wife was unsatisfactory.⁠ ⁠… Because the fifty damsels had all, in duty bound, thought that her mother was an unsatisfactory wife for the brilliant, grey-black haired Eminence with the figure of a stripling that her father had been.⁠ ⁠… They had probably thought that, without the untidy figure of Mrs. Wannop as a weight upon him, he might have become.⁠ ⁠… Well, with one of them!⁠ ⁠… Anything! Any sort of figure in the councils of the nation. Why not Prime Minister? For along with his pedagogic theories he had had political occupations. He had certainly had the friendship of Disraeli. He supplied⁠—it was historic!⁠—materials for eternally famous, meretricious speeches. He would have been head-trainer of the Empire’s proconsuls if the other fellow, at Balliol, had not got in first.⁠ ⁠… As it was he had had to specialise in the Education of Women. Building up Primrose Dames.⁠ ⁠… + 

So Miss Wanostrocht warned her against the deleterious effect of neglected wives upon young, attached virgins! It probably was deleterious. Where would she, Valentine Wannop have been by now if she had thought that Sylvia Tietjens was really a bad one? + 

Miss Wanostrocht said, as if with sudden anxiety: + 

“You are going to do what? You propose to do what?” + 

Valentine said: + 

“Obviously after your conversation with Edith Ethel you won’t be so glad to have me here. My moral influence has not been brightened in aspect!” A wave of passionate resentment swept over her. + 

“Look here,” she said, “if you think that I am prepared to.⁠ ⁠…” + 

She stopped however. “No,” she said, “I am not going to introduce the housemaid note. But you will probably see that this is irritating.” She added: “I would have the case of Pettigul One looked into, if I were you. It might become epidemic in a big school like this. And we’ve no means of knowing where we stand nowadays!” + 