ll wear spectacles without
shame." But the real truth was that the tortoise-shell rims were more
becoming to her. Mrs. Gustus was known to her husband's family as
Anonyma. The origin of this habit was an old joke, and I have forgotten
the point of it.

Cousin Gustus was second cousin once removed to Kew and Kew's sister
Jay, and had kindly brought them up from childhood. He was now at the
further end of the sixties, and embittered by many things: an unsuitable
marriage, the approach of the psalmist's age-limit, incurably modern
surroundings, an internal complaint, and a haunting wish to relieve the
Government of the management of the War. These drawbacks were to a
certain extent linked, they accounted for each other. The complaint
hindered him from offering his services as Secretary of State; it made
of him a slave, so he could not pretend to be a master. He cherished his
slavery, for it happened to be painless, and supplied him with a certain
dignity which would otherwise have been difficult to secure. During the
summer the complaint hibernated, and ceased to interest either doctors
or relations, which was naturally hard to bear. To these trials you may
add the disgraceful behaviour of his young cousin Jay, and admit that
Cousin Gustus had every excuse for encouraging pessimism of the most
pronounced type.

Jay's brother Kew was twenty-five, and from this it follows that he had
already drunk the surprising beverage of War. His military history
included a little splinter of hate in the left shoulder, followed by a
depressing period almost entirely spent in the society of medical boards,
three months of light duty consisting of weary instruction of fools in an
East coast town, and now an interval of leave at the end of which the
battalion to which he had lately been attached hoped to go to France. In
one way it was a pity he ever joined the Army, for khaki clashed badly
with most of Mrs. Gustus's colour theories. But he had never noticed
that: his eye and his ear and his mind were all equally slow to
appreciate clashings of any kind. He was rather aloof from comparison and
criticism, but not on principle. He had no principles--at least no
original ones, just the ordinary stuffy old principles of decency and all
that. He never turned his eyes inward, as far as the passer-by could see;
he lived a breezy life outside himself. He never tried to make a fine Kew
of himself; he never propounded riddles to his Creator, which is