“It’s such a lovely evening,” he said. “Couldn’t we go somewhere and dine under a tree?” “No,” he answered. “Not that sort of sleep.” She could not see his face. But she guessed his meaning.!

“I think that’s why I love it,” she said: “for it’s dear, old-fashioned ways. We will teach it the new dreams, too. It will be so shocked, at first.” “We ought to be comrades,” answered Joan, with a smile. “I, too, am trying to help the People.”

“It’s all right,” answered Madge. “She doesn’t really want our opinion of him—or rather she doesn’t want our real opinion of him. She only wants us to confirm hers. She’s engaged to him.” “It is what I should love,” she answered. “Tell me what to do.” She was not conscious of the low, vibrating tone in which she spoke. 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.