Flossie caught sight of the clock and jumped up. “Who was it said that woman would be the last thing man would civilize?” she asked. One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.!

“You know things when you love anybody,” explained the child. “You feel them. You will come again, soon?” “Yes,” Joan agreed, “I think that does describe me.”

“You will have to imagine yourself my daughter,” she said. “You are taller, but the colouring was the same. You won’t mind, will you?” A young officer was lying in a corner behind a screen. He leant forward and pushed it aside. “Tell me,” said Joan. “What was my mother like? I can only remember her as more or less of an invalid.”