e. I do the most awful things at
times--because I like doing them. I should loathe to be a nurse, and
the W.A.A.C. uniform makes me look a fright. I may not realise the
horrors over the water; I don't want to. And do you suppose half these
women who talk about them so glibly do either? . . . . Of course they
don't; they're just posing. They pretend it's awful and horrible to
dance and play the fool; and all the while their teeth are chattering
with envy and malice. . . ."

"We seem," remarked Vane, taking advantage of a temporary lull in the
flood, "to have arrived at rather a personal discussion."

"Of course we have," she took him up. "Isn't it I--I--I everywhere?
Only a lot of people aren't sufficiently truthful to admit it. It's
Number One first all the way through, right from the people up at the
top down to the poor brutes in the slums. All the wonderful schemes of
reform are for the glory of the schemer first, with the happy
recipients amongst the also rans." She paused a moment, and a sudden
tender look came into her eyes. "Of course there are exceptions.
There's a boy I know--he's a cousin of mine--with weak lungs. Rejected
for the Army three times as totally unfit. For the last four years
he's been living in a slum off Whitechapel and the people there love
him. . . . He just walks in and planks down a pork chop in the back
room; or a bottle of Basa, or something and has a talk to the
woman . . . he's dying . . . but he's dying happy. . . . I couldn't do
that; no more could you. . . . We should loathe it, and so we should
be fools to attempt it. . . ."

"I wonder," said Vane slowly. . . . "I wonder."

"No, you don't," she cried. "You don't wonder. . . . You know I'm
right. . . . If you loved such a life you'd just do it. . . . And
you'd succeed. The people who fail are the people who do things from a
sense of duty."

"What a very dangerous doctrine," smiled Vane.

"Perhaps it is," she answered. "Perhaps in my own way I'm groping too;
perhaps," and she laughed a little apologetically, "I've fitted my
religion to my life. At any rate it's better than fitting other
peoples' lives to one's religion. But it seems to me that God," she
hesitated, as if at a loss for words to express herself--"that God--and
one's surroundings--make one what one is. . . . And unless one is very
certain that either God or the surroundings are wrong, it's asking for
trouble to go on one's own beaten track.