that she, Lady Dawn, was one of these?"

Maisie blew out a lazy puff of smoke. "Everybody thinks so." Then she
added pointedly, "Everybody who knows her and has a right to an
opinion."

Tabs refused to be put off. There was a polite forbearance in his tone
when he spoke. "The first thing to do is to make sure that my Dawn was
the same as yours. Mine was known to us by no title; he was a Captain in
the same battalion as myself. He was killed in front of Pozieres.--Ah, I
see by the way you start, that so was yours! But here's where the
difference comes in; mine loved his wife, if she was his wife, more
dearly than any man I have known. His devotion was the talk of the
regiment."

She flipped the ash off her cigarette. "Then that puts him out of the
running, doesn't it?"

It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger
of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his
mind the vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had
drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by shells like flies
against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their
ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house
of lust and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd
been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their
imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine,
where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as
compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they
were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to
hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this
moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while
living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they
should not be regretted.

"Puts him out of the running! It doesn't."

He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room,
limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the
cushions at a loss to account for his excitement.

"It doesn't," he repeated, pausing opposite to her. "He's still in the
running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a
sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it.
The men adored him because of it. He was the finest officer in the
finest of battalions."

He became aware that he was frightening her and sank h