f hands everybody felt that something positive had indeed
been accomplished.

The new member was a little discouraged. He had the illusion that
the two hospitals run in France for French soldiers by the Lechford
Committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the
committee was discussing an abstraction. Nevertheless, each problem
as it was presented--the drains (postponed), the repairs to the
motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new X-ray apparatus, the
dilatoriness of a French Minister in dealing with correspondence,
the cost per day per patient, the relations with the French civil
authorities and the French military authorities, the appointment of
a new matron who could keep the peace with the senior doctor, and the
great principle involved in deducting five francs fifty centimes for
excess luggage from a nurse's account for travelling expenses--each
problem helped to demonstrate that the hospitals did exist and that
men and women were toiling therein, and that French soldiers in grave
need were being magnificently cared for and even saved from death. And
it was plain, too, that none of these excellent things could have come
to pass or could continue to occur if the committee did not regularly
sit round the table and at short intervals perform the rite of raising
hands....

G.J.'s attention wandered. He could not keep his mind off the thought
that he should soon be seeing Christine again. Sitting at the
table with a mien of intelligent interest, he had a waking dream of
Christine. He saw her just as she was--ingenuous, and ignorant if you
like--except that she was pure. Her purity, though, had not cooled her
temperament, and thus she combined in herself the characteristics
of at least two different women, both of whom were necessary to his
happiness. And she was his wife, and they lived in a roomy house in
Hyde Park Gardens, and the war was over. And she adored him and he
was passionately fond of her. And she was always having children; she
enjoyed having children; she demanded children; she had a child every
year and there was never any trouble. And he never admired her more
poignantly than at the periods just before his children were born,
when she had the vast, exquisitely swelling figure of the French
Renaissance Virgin in marble that stood on a console in his
drawing-room at the Albany.... Such was G.J.'s dream as he assisted
in the control of the Lechford Hospitals. Emerging from it he looked