'I say, Pamela, who _is_ this female, and why has she descended on
us?'
The speaker was Desmond Mannering. He was sitting on the edge of a
much dilapidated arm-chair in the room which had been the twins'
"den" from their childhood, in which Pamela's governess even, before
the girl's school years, was allowed only on occasional and
precarious footing. Here Pamela dabbed in photography, made
triumphant piles of the socks and mittens she kept from her father's
eye, read history, novels, and poetry, and wrote to her school
friends and the boys she had met in Scotland. Ranged along the
mantelpiece were numbers of snapshots--groups and single
figures--taken by her, with results that showed her no great
performer.
At the moment, however, Pamela was engaged in marking Desmond's
socks. She was very jealous of her sisterly prerogative in the
matter of Desmond's kit, and personal affairs generally. Forest was
the only person she would allow to advise her, and one or two
innocent suggestions made that morning by her new chaperon had
produced a good deal of irritation.
Pamela looked up with a flushed countenance.
'I believe father did it specially that he might be able to tell
Alice and Margaret that he hadn't a farthing for their war
charities.'
'You mean because she costs so much?'
'Two hundred and fifty,' said Pamela drily.
'My hat!--and her keep! I call that mean of father,' said Desmond
indignantly. 'You can't go tick with a secretary. It means cash.
There'll never be anything for you, Pam, and nothing for the garden.
The two old fellows that were here last week have been turned off,
Forest tells me?'
'Father expects me to do the garden,' said Pamela, with rather
pinched lips.
'Well, jolly good thing,' laughed her brother. 'Do you a lot of
good, Pam. You never get half enough exercise.'
'I wouldn't mind if I were paid wages and could spend the money as I
liked.'
'Poor old Pam! It is hard lines. I heard father tell the Rector he'd
spent eighteen hundred at that sale.'
'And I'm ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,' said Pamela
fiercely. 'Why they go on trusting us I don't know.'
Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow--a slim figure
in his cadet's uniform. To judge from a picture on the wall behind
his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs. Mannering taken a
year before the birth of the twins--an event which had cost the
mother her life--Desmond resembled her rather than his father. In
both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined--as
indeed also in Pamela--with something that entirely banished any
suggestion of insipidity--something that seemed to say, 'There is a
soul here--and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way
to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in
a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt for recitation at
school:
This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.
Had her mother been happy? That her children could never know.
Desmond's countenance, however, soon cleared. It was impossible for
him to frown for long on any subject. He was very sorry for 'old
Pam.' His father's opinions and behaviour were too queer for words.
He would be jolly worried if he had to stay long at home, like
Pamela. But then he wasn't going to be long at home. He was going
off to his artillery camp in two days, and the thought filled him
with a restless and impatient delight. At the same time he was more
tolerant of his father than Pamela was, though he could not have
told why.
'Desmond, give me your foot,' Pamela presently commanded.
The boy bared his foot obediently, and held it out while Pamela
tried on a sock she had just finished knitting on a new pattern.
'I'm not very good at it,' sighed Pamela. 'Are you sure you can wear
them, Dezzy?'
'Wear them? Ripping!' said the boy, surveying his foot at different
angles. 'But you know, Pam, I can't take half the things you want me
to take. What on earth did you get me a Gieve waistcoat for?'
'How do you know you won't be going to Mesopotamia?'
'Well, I don't know; but I don't somehow think it's very likely.
They get their drafts from Egypt, and there's lots of artillery
there.'
Pamela remembered with annoyance that Miss Bremerton had gently
hinted the same thing when the Gieve waistcoat had been unpacked in
her presence. It was true, of course, that she had a brother
fighting under General Maude. That, no doubt, did give her a modest
right to speak.
'How old do you think she is?' said Desmond, nodding in the
direction of the library.
'Well, she's over thirty.'
'She doesn't look it.'
'Oh, Desmond, she does!'
'Let's call her the New Broom--Broomie for short,' said Desmond.
'Look here, Pam, I wish you'd try and like her. I shall have a
dreadful hump when I get to camp if I think she's going to make you
miserable.'
'Oh, I'll try,' said the girl with dreary resignation. 'You know I'm
not to see Beryl again?' She looked up.
Her brother laughed.
'Don't I see you keeping to that! If Aubrey's any good he'll marry
her straight away. And then how can father boycott her after that?'
'He will,' said Pamela decisively.
'And if father thinks I'm going to give up Arthur, he's jolly well
mistaken,' said the boy with energy. 'Arthur's the best fellow I
know, and he's been just ripping to me.'
The young face softened and glowed as though under the stress of
some guarded memory. Pamela, looking up, caught her brother's
expression and glowed too.
'Beryl says he isn't a bit strong yet. But he's moving heaven and
earth to get back to the front.'
'Well, if they don't give him enough to do he'll be pretty sick.
He's no good at loafing.'
There was silence a little. Outside a misty sunshine lay on the
garden and the park and in it the changing trees were beginning to
assume the individuality and separateness of autumn after the
levelling promiscuity of the summer. The scene was very English and
peaceful; and between it and the two young creatures looking out
upon it there were a thousand links of memory and association.
Suddenly Desmond said:
'Do you remember that bother I got into at Eton, Pam?'
Pamela nodded. Didn't she remember it? A long feud with another
boy--ending in a highly organized fight--absolute defiance of tutor
and housemaster on Desmond's part--and threatened expulsion. The
Squire's irritable pride had made him side ostentatiously with his
son, and Pamela could only be miserable and expect the worst. Then
suddenly the whole convulsion had quieted down, and Desmond's last
year at Eton had been a very happy one. Why? What had happened?
Pamela had never known.
'Well, Arthur heard of it from "my tutor." He and Arthur were at
Trinity together. And Arthur came over from Cambridge and had me out
for a walk, and jawed me, jawed "my tutor," jawed the Head, jawed
everybody. Oh, well no good going into the rotten thing,' said
Desmond, flushing, 'but Arthur was awfully decent anyway.'
Pamela assented mutely. She did not want to talk about Arthur
Chicksands. There was in her a queer foreboding sense about him. She
did not in the least expect him to fall in love with her; yet there
was a dim, intermittent fear in her lest he might become too
important to her, together with a sharp shrinking from the news,
which of course might come any day, that he was going to be married.
She had known him from her childhood, had romped and sparred with
him. He was the gayest, most charming companion; yet he carried with
him, quite unconsciously, something that made it delightful to be
smiled at or praised by him, and a distress when you did not get on
with him, and were quite certain that he thought you silly or
selfish. There was a rumour which reached Mannering after the second
battle of Ypres that he had been killed. The Chicksands' household
believed it for twenty-four hours.
Then he was discovered--gassed and stunned--in a shell-hole, and
there had been a long illness and convalescence. During the
twenty-four hours when he was believed to be dead, Pamela had spent
the April daylight in the depths of the Mannering woods, in tangled
hiding-places that only she knew. It was in the Easter holidays. She
was alone at Mannering with an old governess, while her father was
in London. The little wrinkled Frenchwoman watched her in silence,
whenever she was allowed to see her. Then when on the second morning
there came a telegram from Chetworth, and Pamela tore it open,
flying with it before she read it to the secrecy of her own room,
the Frenchwoman smiled and sighed. 'Ca, c'est l'amour!' she said to
herself, 'assurément c'est l'amour!' And when Pamela came down
again, radiant as a young seraph, and ready to kiss the apple-red
cheek of the Frenchwoman--the rarest concession!--Madame Guérin did
not need to be told that Arthur Chicksands was safe and likely to be
sound.
But the Frenchwoman's inference was premature. During the two years
she had been at school, Pamela had thought very little of Arthur
Chicksands. She was absorbed in one of those devotions to a
woman--her schoolmistress--very common among girls of strong
character, and sometimes disastrous. In her case it had worked well.
And now the period of extravagant devotion was over, and the girl's
mind and heart set free. She thought she had forgotten Arthur
Chicksands, and was certain he must have forgotten her. As it
happened they had never met since his return to the front in the
autumn of 1915--Pamela was then seventeen and a schoolgirl--or, as
she now put it, a baby. She remembered the child who had hidden
herself in the woods as something very far away.
And yet she did not want to talk about 'Arthur,' as she had always
called him, and there was a certain tremor and excitement in her
mind about him. The idea of being prevented from seeing him was
absurd--intolerable. She was already devising ways and means of
doing it. It was really not to be expected that filial obedience
should reign at Mannering.
* * * * *
The twins had long left the subject of the embargo on Chetworth, and
were wrangling and chaffing over the details of Desmond's packing,
when there was a knock at the door.
Pamela stiffened at once.
'Come in!'
Miss Bremerton entered.
'Are you very busy?'
'Not at all!' said Desmond politely, scurrying with his best Eton
manners to find a chair for the newcomer. 'It's an awful muddle, but
that's Pamela!'
Pamela aimed a sponge-bag at him, which he dodged, and Elizabeth
Bremerton sat down.
'I want to hold a council with you,' she said, turning a face just
touched with laughter from one to the other. 'Do you mind?'
'Certainly not,' said Desmond, sitting on the floor with his hands
round his knees. 'What's it about?' And he gave Pamela's right foot
a nudge with his left by way of conveying to her that he thought her
behaviour ungracious. Pamela hurriedly murmured, 'Delighted.'
'I want to tell you about the servants,' said Elizabeth. 'I can't do
anything unless you help me.'
'Help you in what?' said Desmond, wondering.
'Well, you know, it's simply scandalous what you're all eating in
this house!' exclaimed Elizabeth, with sudden energy. 'You ought to
be fined.' She frowned, and her fair Dutch complexion became a
bright pink.
'It's quite true,' said Pamela, startled. 'I told father, and he
laughed at me.'
'But now even the servants are on strike,' said Elizabeth. 'It's
Forest that's been preaching to them. He and Cook have been drawing
up a week's _menu_, according to the proper scale. But--'
'Father won't have it,' said Pamela decidedly.
'An idea has occurred to me,' was Elizabeth's apologetic reply.
'Your father doesn't come in to lunch?'
'Happy thought!' cried Desmond. 'Send him in a Ritz luncheon, while
the rest of you starve. Easy enough for me to say as I'm off--and
soldiers aren't rationed! We may be as greedy pigs as we like.'
'What do you say?' Elizabeth looked at Pamela. The girl was
flattered by the deference shown her, and gradually threw herself
into the little plot. How to set up a meatless day for the
household, minus the Squire, and not be found out; how to restrict
the bread and porridge allowance, while apparently outrunning
it--knotty problems! into which the twins plunged with much laughter
and ingenuity. At the end of the discussion, Elizabeth said with
hesitation, 'I don't like not telling Mr. Mannering, but--'
'Oh no, you can't tell him' said Pamela, in her most resolute tone.
'Besides, it's for the country!'
'Yes, it's the country!' echoed Elizabeth. 'Oh, I'm so glad you
agree with me. Forest's splendid!'
'I say, Broomie's not bad,' thought Desmond. Aloud he said,
'Forest's a regular Turk in the servants' hall--rules them all with
a rod of iron.'
Elizabeth laughed. 'He tells me there was a joint of cold beef last
night for supper, and he carried it away bodily back into the
larder. And they all supped on fried potatoes, cheese, oatcake and
jam! So then I asked him whether anybody minded, and he said the
little kitchen-maid cried a bit, and said she "was used to her
vittles and her mother would be dreadfully put out." "'_Mother_!'
says I, 'haven't you got _a young man_!' And then I give her a real
talking to about the war. 'You back your young man,' I said, 'and
there's only one way as females can do it--barring them as is in
munitions. Every bit of bread you don't eat is helping to kill
Boches. And what else is your young man doin'? Where do you say he
is? Wipers? You ask him. He'll tell you!' So then we were all nice
and comfortable--and you needn't bother about us downstairs. _We're_
all right!"'
'Good old Forest!' laughed Desmond, delighted. 'I always knew he was
the real boss here. Father thinks he is, but he can't do without
Forest, and the old boy knows it.'
'Well, so that's agreed,' said Elizabeth demurely, as she rose. 'I
naturally couldn't do anything without you, but so long as your
father gets everything that he's accustomed to--'
'I don't see quite what you're going to do about dinner--late
dinner, I mean?' said Pamela pensively.
Elizabeth beamed at her.
'Well, I became a vegetarian last week, except for very occasional
break-outs. Fish is a vegetable!'
'I see,' reflected Pamela. 'We can break out now and then at dinner,
when father's got his eye on us--'
'And be pure patriots at lunch,' laughed Miss Bremerton, as she
opened the door. 'Au revoir! I must go back to work.'
She vanished. The brother and sister looked at each other.
Desmond gave his opinion.
'I believe she's a good sort!'
'"Wait and see,"' said Pamela pompously, and returned to her
packing.
* * * * *
The preceding conversation took place during a break in Elizabeth's
morning occupations. She had been busily occupied in collecting and
copying out some references from Pausanias, under the Squire's
direction. He meanwhile had been cataloguing and noting his new
possessions, which, thanks to the aid of his henchman Levasseur, had
been already arranged. And they made indeed a marvellous addition to
the Mannering library and its collections. At the end of the room
stood now a huge archaic Nikê, with outstretched peplum and soaring
wings. To her left was the small figure, archaic also, of a
charioteer, from the excavations at Delphi, amazingly full of life
in spite of hieratic and traditional execution. But the most
conspicuous thing of all was a mutilated Erôs, by a late Rhodian
artist--subtle, thievish, lovely, breathing an evil and daemonic
charm. It stood opposite the Nikê, 'on tiptoe for a flight.' And
there was that in it which seemed at moments to disorganize the
room, and lay violent and exclusive hold on the spectator.
Elizabeth on returning to her table found the library empty. The
Squire had been called away by his agent and one of the new
officials of the county, and had not yet returned. She expected him
to return in a bad--possibly an outrageous temper. For she gathered
that the summons had something to do with the decree of the County
War Agricultural Committee that fifty acres, at least, of Mannering
Park were to be given back to the plough, which, indeed, had only
ceased to possess them some sixty years before. The Squire had gone
out pale with fury, and she looked anxiously at her work, to see
what there might be in it to form an excuse for a hurricane.
She could find nothing, however, likely to displease a sane man. And
as she was at a standstill till he came back, she slipped an
unfinished letter out of her notebook, and went on with it. It was
to a person whom she addressed as 'my darling Dick.'
'I have now been rather more than a month here. You can't
imagine what a queer place it is, nor what a queer employer I
have struck. There might be no war--as far as Mannering is
concerned. The Squire is always engaged in mopping it out, like
Mrs. Partington. He takes no newspaper, except a rag called the
_Lanchester Mail_, which attacks the Government, the Army--as
far as it dare--and "secret diplomacy." It comes out about once
a week with a black page, because the Censor has been sitting on
it. Desmond Mannering--that's the gunner-son who came on leave a
week ago and is just going off to an artillery camp--and I,
conspire through the butler--who is a dear, and a patriot--to
get the _Times_; but the Squire never sees it. Desmond reads it
in bed in the morning, I read it in bed in the evening, and
Pamela Mannering, Mr. Desmond's twin, comes in last thing, in
her dressing-gown, and steals it.
'I seem indeed to be living in the heart of a whirlwind, for the
Squire is fighting everybody all round, and as he is the least
reticent of men, and I have to write his letters, I naturally,
even by now, know a good deal about him. Shortly put, he is in a
great mess. The estate is riddled with mortgages, which it would
be quite easy to reduce. For instance, there are masses of
timber, crying to be cut. He consults me often in the naïvest
way. You remember that I trained for six months as an
accountant. I assure you that it comes in extremely useful now!
I can see my way a little where he can't see it at all. He
glories in the fact that he was never any good at arithmetic or
figures of any kind, and never looked at either after "Smalls."
The estate of course used to be looked after in the good
old-fashioned way by the family lawyers. But a few years ago
the Squire quarrelled with these gentlemen, recovered all his
papers, which no doubt went back to King Alfred, and resolved to
deal with things himself. There is an office here, and a small
attorney from Fallerton comes over twice or three times a week.
But the Squire bosses it. And you never saw anything like his
accounts! I have been trying to put some of them straight--just
those that concern the house and garden--after six weeks'
acquaintance! Odd, isn't it? He is like an irritable child with
them. And his agent, who is seventy, and bronchitic, is the
greatest fool I ever saw. He neglects everything. _His_ accounts
too, as far as I have inspected them, are disgraceful. He does
nothing for the farmers, and the farmers do exactly as they
please with the land.
'Or did! For now comes the rub. Government is interfering,
through the County Committee. They are turning out three of Mr.
Mannering's farmers by force, because he won't do it himself,
and ploughing up the park. I believe the steam tractor comes
next week. The Squire has been employing some new lawyers to
find out if he can't stop it somehow. And each time he sees them
he comes home madder than before.
'Of course it all comes from a passionate antagonism to the war.
He is not a pacifist exactly--he is not a conscientious
objector. He is just an individualist gone mad--an egotistical,
hot-tempered man, with all the ideas of the old _régime_, who
thinks he can fight the world. I am often really sorry for
him--he is so preposterous. But the muddle and waste of it all
drives me crazy--you know I always was a managing creature.
'But one thing is certain--that he is a most excellent scholar.
I knew I had got rusty, but I didn't know how rusty till I came
to work for him. He has a wonderful memory--seems to know every
Greek author by heart--and a most delicate and unerring taste. I
thought I should find a mere dabbler--an amateur. And it takes
all I know to do the drudgery work he gives me. And then he is
always coming down upon me. It delights him to find me out in a
howler--makes him, in fact, quite good-tempered for twenty
minutes.
'As to the rest of the family, there is a charming boy and
girl--twins of nineteen, the boy just off to an artillery camp
after his cadet training; the girl extremely pretty and
distinguished, and so far inclined to think me an intruder and a
nuisance. How to get round her I don't exactly know, but I
daresay I shall manage it somehow. If she would only set up a
love-affair I could soon get the whip-hand of her!
'Then there is the priceless butler, with whom I have already
made friends. I seem to have a taste for butlers, though I've
never lived with one. He is fifty-two and a volunteer, in stark
opposition to the Squire, who jeers at him perpetually. Forest
takes it calmly, seems even in a queer way to be attached to his
queer master. But he never misses a drill for anybody or any
weather, and when he's out, the under-housemaid "buttles" for
him like a lamb. The fact is, of course, that he's been here for
twenty years, and the Squire couldn't get on for a day without
him, or thinks he couldn't. So that his position is, as you may
say, strongly entrenched, and counter-attacks are useless.
'The married daughters--Mrs. Gaddesden, who, I think, is an
Honourable, and Mrs. Strang--are coming to-morrow to see their
brother before he goes into camp. The Squire doesn't want them
at all. Ah, there he comes! I'll finish later...'
* * * * *
The Squire came in--to use one of the Homeric similes of which he
was so fond--'like a lion fresh from a slain bull, bespattered with
blood and mire.' He had gone out pale, he returned crimson, rubbing
his hands and in great excitement. And it was evident that he had by
now formed the habit of talking freely to his secretary. For he went
up to her at once.
'Well, now they know what to expect!' he said, his eyes glittering,
and all his thick hair on his small peaked head standing up in a
high ridge, like the crest of a battle-helmet.
'Who are "they"?' asked Elizabeth, smiling, as she quietly pushed
her letter a little further under the blotting-paper.
'The County Council idiots--no, the Inspector fellow they're sending
round.'
'And what did you tell him?'
'That I should resist their entry. The gates of the park will be
locked. And my lawyers are already preparing a case for the High
Court. Well--eh!--what?'--the speaker wound up impatiently, as
though waiting for an immediate and applauding response.
Elizabeth was silent. She bent over the Greek book in front of her,
as though looking for her place.
'You didn't think I was going to take it lying down!' asked the
Squire, in a raised voice. Her silence suggested to him afresh all
the odious and tyrannical forces by which he felt himself
surrounded.
Elizabeth turned to him with a cheerful countenance.
'I don't quite understand what "it" means,' she said politely.
'Nonsense, you do!' was the angry reply. 'That's so like a woman.
They always want to catch you out; they never see things simply and
broadly. You'd like to make yourself out a fool--[Greek: nêpia]--and
you're not a fool!'
And with his hands in his pockets he made two or three long strides
up to the Nikê, at the further end of the room, and back, pulling up
beside her again, as though challenging her reply.
'I assure you, sir, I wasn't trying to catch you out,' Elizabeth
began in her gentlest voice.
'Don't call me "sir." I won't have it!' cried the Squire, almost
stamping.
Then Elizabeth laughed outright.
'I'm sorry, but when I was working in the War Trade Department I
always called the head of my room "sir."'
'That's because women _like_ kow-towing--[Greek: doulosunên
anechesthai]!' said the Squire. Then he threw himself into a chair.
'Now let's talk sense a little.'
Elizabeth's attentive look, and lips quivering with amusement which
she tried in vain to suppress, and he was determined not to see,
showed her more than willing.
'I suppose you think--like that fellow I've just routed--that it's
a uestion of food production. It isn't! It's a question of
_liberty_--_versus_ bondage. If we can only survive as slaves, then
wipe us out! That's my view.'
'Wasn't there a bishop once who said he would rather have England
free than sober?' asked Elizabeth.
'And a very sensible man,' growled the Squire, 'though in general
I've no use for bishops. Now you understand, I hope? This is going
to be a test case. I'll make England ring.'
'Are you sure they can't settle it at once, under the Defence of the
Realm Act?'
'Not they!' said the Squire triumphantly. 'Of course, I'm not
putting up a frontal defence. I'm outflanking them. I'm proving that
this is the worst land they could possibly choose. I'm offering them
something else that they don't want. Meanwhile the gates shall be
locked, and if any one or anything breaks them down--my lawyers are
ready--we apply for an injunction at once.'
'And you're not--well, nervous?' asked Miss Bremerton, with a
charming air of presenting something that might have been
overlooked.
'Nervous of what?'
'Isn't the law--the new law--rather dreadfully strong?'
'Oh, you think I shall end in the county gaol?' said the Squire
abruptly. 'Well, of course'--he took a reflective turn up and
down--'I've no particular wish just now for the county gaol. It
would be an infernal nuisance--in the middle of this book. But I
mean to give them as much trouble as I can. I'm all right so far.'
He looked up suddenly, and caught an expression on his secretary's
face which called him to order at once, though he was not meant to
see it. Contempt?--cold contempt? Something like it.
The Squire drew himself up.
'You've made the arrangements, I suppose, for to-morrow?'
He spoke curtly, as the master of the house to a dependent.
Elizabeth meekly replied that she had done everything according to
his directions. Mrs. Gaddesden was to have the South rooms.
'I said the East rooms!'
'But I thought--' Elizabeth began, in consternation.
'You thought wrong,' said the Squire cuttingly. 'Do not trouble
yourself. I will tell Forest'
Elizabeth coloured crimson, and went on with her work. The Squire
rang the bell. But before Forest could answer it, there was a quick
step in the passage, and Desmond came bursting in.
'Pater, I say! it's too fine! You can't frowst all day at this
nonsense. Come out, and let's shoot those roots of Milsom's. He told
me yesterday there were five or six coveys in his big field alone.
Of course everybody's been poaching for all they're worth. But
there's some left. Forest'll get us some sandwiches. He says he'll
come and load for you. His boy and the garden boy'll do for
beaters.'
The Squire stood glumly hesitating, but with his eye on his son.
'Look here,' said Desmond, 'I've only got two days!'
Elizabeth could not help watching the boy--his look at his father,
the physical beauty and perfection of him. The great Victory at the
end of the room with her outstretched wings seemed to be hovering
above him.
'Well, I don't mind,' said the Squire slowly.
Desmond gave a laugh of triumph, twined his arm in that of his
father, and dragged him away.
* * * * *
'DEAR BELOVED DICK--I must just finish this before dinner. Oh,
how I like to think of you at Baghdad, with trees and shade,
and civilized quarters again, after all you've gone through.
Have you got my letters, and those gauze things I sent you for
the hot weather? They tell me here they're right. But how's one
to know? Meanwhile, my dear, here are your mother and sister on
their knees to you, just to be told what you want. Try and want
something!--there's a dear.
'Mother's fairly well--I mean as well as we can expect after
such an illness. My salary here enables me to give her a proper
trained nurse, and to send Jean to school. As to the rest,
don't trouble about me, old man. Sometimes I think it was my
pride more than anything else that was hurt a year ago. Anyway
I find in myself a tremendous appetite for work. In spite of
his oddities, Mr. Mannering is a most stimulating critic and
companion. My work is interesting, and I find myself steeped
once more in the most fascinating, the most wonderful of all
literatures! What remains unsatisfied in me is the passion
which you know I have always had for setting things
straight--organizing, tidying up! Not to speak of other
passions--for work directly connected with the war, for
instance--which have had to be scrapped for a time. I can't
bear the muddle and waste of this place. It gets on my nerves.
Perhaps, if I stay, I may get a chance. I have made a small
beginning--with the food. But I won't bother you with it.
'Above all, I must try and make friends with the twins.
Desmond would be easy, but he's going. Pamela will be more
difficult. However, I shall do my best. As I have already said,
if she would only set up a flirtation--a nice one--that I could
aid and abet!
'What will the married sisters be like? Desmond and Pamela say
very little. All I know is that Alice--that's Mrs.
Gaddesden--is to have a fire in her room all day, though the
weather now is like July. To judge from her photographs, she is
fair, rather pretty, stout and lethargic. Whereas Margaret is
as thin almost as her father, and head-over-ears in war
charities. She lives, says Pamela, on arrowroot and oatcake, to
set an example, and her servants leave her regularly every
month.
'Well, we shall see. I run on like this, because you say you
like to be gossipped to; and I am just a little lonely
here--sometimes. Good-night, and good-bye.--Your devoted
sister,
'ELIZABETH.'