Miss Ensor turned to her. “Oh, you talk to him,” she urged. “Here, he’s lost his job again, and is losing his girl: all because of his silly politics. Tell him he’s got to have sense and stop it.” A wizened little man had been listening to it all one day. He had a curiously rat-like face, with round, red, twinkling eyes, and a long, pointed nose that twitched as he talked.!

Phillips thought that living out of town might be better for her, in the future—somewhere in Surrey, where he could easily get up and down. He could sleep himself at the club on nights when he had to be late. “I might,” he answered, “if I had known the value of it. I found a cable waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month; and I had to return immediately.”

“I’ve had such a funny letter from Flossie,” said Joan, “begging me almost with tears in her ink to come to her on Sunday evening to meet a ‘gentleman friend’ of hers, as she calls him, and give her my opinion of him. What on earth is she up to?” Could we ever hope to eradicate it? Was not the survival of this fighting instinct proof that war was still needful to us? In the sculpture-room of an exhibition she came upon a painted statue of Bellona. Its grotesqueness shocked her at first sight, the red streaming hair, the wild eyes filled with fury, the wide open mouth—one could almost hear it screaming—the white uplifted arms with outstretched hands! Appalling! Terrible! And yet, as she gazed at it, gradually the thing grew curiously real to her. She seemed to hear the gathering of the chariots, the neighing of the horses, the hurrying of many feet, the sound of an armouring multitude, the shouting, and the braying of the trumpets. He had been speaking in a clear, self-confident tone, as if at last he saw his road before him to the end; and felt that nothing else mattered but that he should go forward hopefully, unfalteringly. Now he paused, and his eyes wandered. But the lines about his strong mouth deepened.