inking of. I suspected
that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had
come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie.
Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year,
when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never
lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with
the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till,
wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill
of her wounds and had nearly died of them.

And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be
ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive
what it must have been for her!

And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to
say good-bye.

I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure.
I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the
room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on
her, and that they held each other an instant--tight, like lovers--and
that neither of them said a word.

* * * * *

After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to
have wiped Jimmy out.

Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of
his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew
that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use
for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his
writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he
didn't look out and do something there would be an end of _him_. And he
couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and
insignificance--to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if
he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw,
or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite
sane.

He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't
buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he
couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers
wouldn't help him. They _could_ help him, he declared, if they liked.
Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.

Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny,
and we had laugh