uld go over her day and probe it for tender points. "Oh, that
was a dreadful thing to say," was a refrain that would keep her awake for
hours, wriggling and giggling in her bed over the dreadfulness of it. She
had too little egoism. The lack gave her face a look of littleness. A
lack of altruism has the same outward effect. A complete face should be
full of something, of gentleness, of vigour, of humour, of wickedness.
The admirer's face was only half full of anything. All the same there was
charm about her, the fact that she was an admirer was charming. Mrs.
Gustus reassured her.

"We shall be most grateful for a guide."

"We should be even more grateful for an excuse to call on this
inoffensive young man and his mother at eleven o'clock in the morning,"
objected Kew.

"He ought to be at the Front," was the excuse provided by Cousin Gustus.

"So ought I," sighed Kew.

"Oh, but you're a wounded, aren't you?" asked the admirer. There were
signs of a possible transfer of admiration, and Mrs. Gustus interposed
with presence of mind.

"We'll start," she said. "Don't let's be hampered in the beginning of our
quest by social littleness."

She was conscious that she looked handsome enough for any breach of
convention. She wore an unusual shaped dress the colour of vanilla ice.
Instead of doing her hair as usual in one severe penny bun at the back,
she had constructed a halfpenny bun, so to speak, over each ear. This is
a very literary way of doing the hair, and the remembrance of the
admirer, haunting Anonyma's waking thoughts, had inspired the change.

Their way lay through the beechwood that embroiders the hem of the down's
cloak. There are only two colours in a beechwood after rain, lilac and
green. A bank of violets is not more pure in colour than a beech trunk
shining in the sun. The two colours answered one another, fainter and
fainter, away and away, to the end of one's sight, and there were two
cuckoos, hidden in the dream, mocking each other in velvet voices. The
view between the trees was made up of horizons that tilted one's chin.
The bracken, very young, on an opposite slope, was like a cloud of green
wings alighting. But the look of their destination disappointed them.

"This house faces south," said Kew.

"I feel sure--" began Mr. Russell, but Mrs. Gustus said:

"As we are here, we might ask. To be sure, the cliff is rather tame."

"But there is an aeroplane," persisted the admirer.

"Now pause, An