“Hullo!” she said. “Are you two concluding a bargain?” He was silent for a few moments, and then he leant across and took her hands in his.!

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. “I want to know,” she said.

“No,” answered Joan. “But my mother was. Are you?” “Nature appears to have only one idea in her head,” she continued after a pause, “so far as we men and women are concerned. She’s been kinder to the lower animals.” “You told me my coming would take you back thirty-three years,” Joan reminded him. “It makes us about the same age. I shall treat you as just a young man.”