-detached houses for being at the disposal of any one in sickness or
trouble. She was not strong in body, for things had gone wrong when she
bore her first, but her spirit had that peculiar power of seeing things
as they were, and yet refusing to be dismayed, which so embarrasses
Fate. She saw her husband's defects clearly, and his good qualities no
less distinctly--they never quarrelled. She gauged her children's
characters too, with an admirable precision, which left, however,
loopholes of wonder as to what they would become.

The outbreak of the war found them on the point of going to Margate for
Bank Holiday, an almost unparalleled event; so that the importance of
the world catastrophe was brought home to them with a vividness which
would otherwise have been absent from folks so simple, domestic, and
far-removed from that atmosphere in which the egg of war is hatched.
Over the origin and merits of the struggle, beyond saying to each other
several times that it was a dreadful thing, Mr. and Mrs. Gerhardt held
but one little conversation, lying in their iron bed with an immortal
brown eiderdown patterned with red wriggles over them. They agreed that
it was a cruel, wicked thing to invade "that little Belgium," and there
left a matter which seemed to them a mysterious and insane perversion of
all they had hitherto been accustomed to think of as life. Reading their
papers--a daily and a weekly, in which they had as much implicit faith
as a million other readers--they were soon duly horrified by the reports
therein of "Hun" atrocities; so horrified that they would express their
condemnation of the Kaiser and his militarism as freely as if they had
been British subjects. It was therefore with an uneasy surprise that
they began to find these papers talking of "the Huns at large in our
midst," of "spies," and the national danger of "nourishing such vipers."
They were deeply conscious of not being "vipers," and such sayings began
to awaken in both their breasts a humble sense of injustice as it were.
This was more acute in the breast of little Mrs. Gerhardt, because, of
course, the shafts were directed not at her but at her husband. She knew
her husband so well, knew him incapable of anything but homely, kindly
busyness, and that he should be lumped into the category of "Huns" and
"spies" and tarred with the brush of mass hatred amazed and stirred her
indignation, or would have, if her Cockney temperament had allowed her
to t