The landlady entered with Joan’s tea. Joan took an instinctive dislike to her. She was a large, flashy woman, wearing a quantity of cheap jewellery. Her familiarity had about it something almost threatening. Joan waited till she heard the woman’s heavy tread descending the stairs, before she expressed her opinion. And suddenly—as years before in a Paris music hall—there leapt to life within Joan’s brain a little impish creature that took possession of her. She hoped the miracle would not happen. The little impish creature within her brain was marching up and down beating a drum. She wished he would stop a minute. Someone was trying to talk to her, telling her she ought to be tremendously shocked and grieved. He—or she, or whatever it was that was trying to talk to her, appeared concerned about Reason and Pity and Universal Brotherhood and Civilization’s clock—things like that. But the little impish drummer was making such a din, she couldn’t properly hear. Later on, perhaps, he would get tired; and then she would be able to listen to this humane and sensible person, whoever it might be.!

She ought to have insisted on their going to a decent shop. The mere advertisement ought to have forewarned her. It was the posters that had captured Mrs. Phillips: those dazzling apartments where bejewelled society reposed upon the “high-class but inexpensive designs” of Mr. Krebs. Artists ought to have more self-respect than to sell their talents for such purposes. He was silent for a while, with a quiet look on his face.

Mary gave her a hug, and almost ran away. Joan watched the little child-like figure growing smaller. It glided in and out among the people. “Did you talk it over with her?” asked Joan. A motor carried them to where the road ended, and from there, a little one-horse ambulance took them on to almost the last trees of the forest. There was no life to be seen anywhere. During the last mile, they had passed through a continuous double line of graves; here and there a group of tiny crosses keeping one another company; others standing singly, looking strangely lonesome amid the torn-up earth and shattered trees. But even these had ceased. Death itself seemed to have been frightened away from this terror-haunted desert.