was
silently estimating. For him she made an exquisite figure in the
drawing-room. She was so correct in her church-dress, so modest, prim
and demure. And her appearance clashed excitingly with his absolute
knowledge of her secret temperament. He had often hesitated in his
judgment of her. Was she good enough or was she not? But now he
thought more highly of her than ever. She was ideal, divine, the
realisation of a dream. And he felt extraordinarily pleased with
himself because, after much cautious indecision, he had invited her
to visit him. By heaven, she was young physically, and yet she knew
everything! Her miraculous youthfulness rejuvenated him.

As a fact he was essentially younger than he had been for years. Not
only she, but his war work, had re-vitalised him. He had developed
into a considerable personage on the Lechford Committee; he was
chairman of a sub-committee; he bore responsibilities and had worries.
And for a climax the committee had sent him out to France to report on
the accountancy of the hospitals; he had received a special passport;
he had had glimpses of the immense and growing military organisation
behind the Front; he had chatted in his fluent and idiomatic French
with authorities military and civil; he had been ceremoniously
complimented on behalf of his committee and country by high officials
of the Service de Sante. A wondrous experience, from which he had
returned to England with a greatly increased self-respect and a
sharper apprehension of the significance of the war.

Life in London was proceeding much as usual. If on the one hand the
Treasury had startlingly put an embargo upon capital issues, on the
other hand the King had resumed his patronage of the theatre, and the
town talked of a new Lady Teazle, and a British dye-industry had been
inaugurated. But behind the thin gauze of social phenomena G.J. now
more and more realistically perceived and conceived the dark shape
of the war as a vast moving entity. He kept concurrently in his mind,
each in its place, the most diverse factors and events: not merely
the Flemish and the French battles, but the hoped-for intervention of
Roumania, the defeat of the Austrians by Servia, the menace of a new
Austrian attack on Servia, the rise in prices, the Russian move north
of the Vistula, the raid on Yarmouth, the divulgence of the German
axioms about frightfulness, the rumour of a definite German submarine
policy, the terrible storm that had dis