ll be fellow workers."

Catherine, while she waited for her tea in the Carlton lounge on the
following afternoon, gazed through the drooping palms which sheltered
the somewhat secluded table at which she was seated upon a very
brilliant scene. It was just five o'clock, and a packed crowd of
fashionable Londoners was listening to the strains of a popular band, or
as much of it as could be heard above the din of conversation.

"This is all rather amazing, is it not?" she remarked to her companion.

The latter, an attache at a neutral Embassy, dropped his eyeglass
and polished it with a silk handkerchief, in the corner of which was
embroidered a somewhat conspicuous coronet.

"It makes an interesting study," he declared. "Berlin now is madly gay,
Paris decorous and sober. It remains with London to be normal,--London
because its hide is the thickest, its sensibility the least acute, its
selfishness the most profound."

Catherine reflected for a moment.

"I think," she said, "that a philosophical history of the war will some
day, for those who come after us, be extraordinarily interesting. I mean
the study of the national temperaments as they were before, as they are
now during the war, and as they will be afterwards. There is one thing
which will always be noted, and that is the intense dislike which you,
perhaps I, certainly the majority of neutrals, feel towards England."

"It is true," the young man assented solemnly. "One finds it
everywhere."

"Before the war," Catherine went on, "it was Germany who was hated
everywhere. She pushed her way into the best places at hotels, watering
places--Monte Carlo, for instance and the famous spas. Today, all that
accumulated dislike seems to be turned upon England. I am not myself a
great admirer of this country, and yet I ask myself why?"

"England is smug," the young man pronounced; "She is callous; she is,
without meaning to be, hypocritical. She works herself into a terrible
state of indignation about the misdeeds of her neighbours, and she
does not realise her own faults. The Germans are overbearing, but one
realises that and expects it. Englishmen are irritating. It is certainly
true that amongst us remaining neutrals," he added, dropping his voice
a little and looking around to be sure of their isolation, "the sympathy
remains with the Central Powers."

"I have some dear friends in this country, too," Catherine sighed.

"Naturally--amongst those of your own orde