“Yes, I do,” said Joan. “I like you, sometimes.” Joan could not say. So much depended upon the general state of health. There was the case of her own father. Of course she would always be subject to attacks. But this one would have warned her to be careful.!

“It was built by Kent in seventeen-forty for your great-great grandfather,” he explained. He was regarding it more affectionately. “Solid respectability was the dream, then.” “Yes,” he answered. “One lives by habit.”

“I may not be here,” she continued, “when the new plans are submitted. Tell them not to forget the foundation this time. Tell them to teach the children.” Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war. Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud; lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud, motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried ranks of muddy men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling ever through the endless mud. He was looking at her with those shy, worshipping eyes of his that always made her marvel at her own wonderfulness.