along the table. Quite half the members were dreaming too, and he
wondered what thoughts were moving secretly within them. But the
chairman was not dreaming. He never loosed his grasp of the matter in
hand. Nor did the earnest young blonde by the chairman's side who took
down in stenography the decisions of the committee.

Chapter 14

QUEEN

Then Lady Queenie Paulle entered rather hurriedly, filling the room
with a distinguished scent. All the men rose in haste, and there was a
frightful scraping of chair-legs on the floor. Lady Queenie cheerfully
apologised for being late, and, begging no one to disturb himself,
took a modest place between the chairman and the secretary and a
little behind them.

Lady Queenie obviously had what is called "race". The renown of her
family went back far, far beyond its special Victorian vogue, which
had transformed an earldom into a marquisate and which, incidentally,
was responsible for the new family Christian name that Queenie herself
bore. She was young, tall, slim and pale, and dressed with the utmost
smartness in black--her half-brother having gloriously lost his life
in September. She nodded to the secretary, who blushed with pleasure,
and she nodded to several members, including G.J. Being accustomed
to publicity and to seeing herself nearly every week in either _The
Tatler_ or _The Sketch_, she was perfectly at ease in the room, and
the fact that nearly the whole company turned to her as plants to the
sun did not in the least disturb her.

The attention which she received was her due, for she had few rivals
as a war-worker. She was connected with the Queen's Work for Women
Fund, Queen Mary's Needlework Guild, the Three Arts Fund, the Women's
Emergency Corps, and many minor organisations. She had joined a
Women's Suffrage Society because such societies were being utilised by
the Government. She had had ten lessons in First Aid in ten days, had
donned the Red Cross, and gone to France with two motor-cars and a
staff and a French maid in order to help in the great national work
of nursing wounded heroes; and she might still have been in France had
not an unsympathetic and audacious colonel of the R.A.M.C. insisted on
her being shipped back to England. She had done practically everything
that a patriotic girl could do for the war, except, perhaps, join a
Voluntary Aid Detachment and wash dishes and scrub floors for fifteen
hours a day and thirteen and a half days a fort