“But I like cooking, you know, dearie,” grumbled Mary. “There’s no interest in warming things up.” The little old lady straightened herself. There came a hardening of the thin, firm mouth.!

He turned and leant over his desk. “I guess they’ll have to find another leader if they’re in a hurry,” he added. “I don’t seem able to think about turnips and cows.” There was but one other woman at the hospital. It had been a farmhouse. The man and both sons had been killed during the first year of the war, and the woman had asked to be allowed to stay on. Her name was Madame Lelanne. She was useful by reason of her great physical strength. She could take up a man as he lay and carry him on her outstretched arms. It was an expressionless face, with dull, slow-moving eyes that never changed. She and Joan shared a small grenier in one of the barns. Joan had brought with her a camp bedstead; but the woman, wrapping a blanket round her, would creep into a hole she had made for herself among the hay. She never took off her clothes, except the great wooden-soled boots, so far as Joan could discover.

“Oh, don’t be nonsensical,” she said. “Your father isn’t the only man married to a woman not as clever as himself. He isn’t going to let that stop him. And your mother’s going to learn to be the wife of a great man and do the best she can. And if they don’t like her they’ve got to put up with her. I shall talk to the both of them.” A wave of motherliness towards the entire Phillips family passed over her. It included Hilda. She caught the child to her and gave her a hug. “You go back to school,” she said, “and get on as fast as you can, so that you’ll be able to be useful to him.” “But why should you give up your art?” persisted Joan. It was that was sticking in her mind. “I should have thought that, if only for the sake of the child, you would have gone on with it.” “Tell me,” she said. “If it had been the photo of a woman with a bony throat and a beaky nose would you have read them?”