She looked up Phillips at the House, and gave him Greyson’s message. He had just returned from Folkestone, and was worried. “I expect that was it,” Joan confessed. “It interferes with our reason at times.”!

“I wonder how many of my ideals will be left to me,” sighed Joan. “I always used to regard the Press as the modern pulpit.” “No,” answered Joan. “I’m a Lancashire lass.”

“You can face it,” she said: “the possibility of all your life’s work being wasted?” “I know an old actress,” he continued. “She’s the mother of four. They are all on the stage and they’ve all made their mark. The youngest was born in her dressing-room, just after the curtain had fallen. She was playing the Nurse to your mother’s Juliet. She is still the best Nurse that I know. ‘Jack’s always worrying me to chuck it and devote myself to the children,’ she confided to me one evening, while she was waiting for her cue. ‘But, as I tell him, I’m more helpful to them being with them half the day alive than all the day dead.’ That’s an anecdote worth remembering, when your time comes. If God gives woman a drum he doesn’t mean man to take it away from her. She hasn’t got to be playing it for twenty-four hours a day. I’d like you to have seen your mother’s Cordelia.” “A section of the Paris Press is doing all it can to help him, of course,” explained Mrs. Denton. “It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Germany is only waiting her opportunity, and that, if Russia comes in, it is bound to bring Austria. Europe will pay dearly one day for the luxury of a free Press.”