“I am paid a thousand a year,” so Greyson read to them, “for keeping my own opinions out of my paper. Some of you, perhaps, earn more, and others less; but you’re getting it for writing what you’re told. If I were to be so foolish as to express my honest opinion, I’d be on the street, the next morning, looking for another job.” Mrs. Phillips’s conversion Joan found more difficult than she had anticipated. She had persuaded Phillips to take a small house and let her furnish it upon the hire system. Joan went with her to the widely advertised “Emporium” in the City Road, meaning to advise her. But, in the end, she gave it up out of sheer pity. Nor would her advice have served much purpose, confronted by the “rich and varied choice” provided for his patrons by Mr. Krebs, the “Furnisher for Connoisseurs.”!

It was Carleton of the Daily Dispatch group who had first divined her possibilities. With a swift glance on his way through, he had picked her out from a line of depressed-looking men and women ranged against the wall of the dark entrance passage; and with a snap of his fingers had beckoned to her to follow him. Striding in front of her up to his room, he had pointed to a chair and had left her sitting there for three-quarters of an hour, while he held discussion with a stream of subordinates, managers and editors of departments, who entered and departed one after another, evidently in pre-arranged order. All of them spoke rapidly, without ever digressing by a single word from the point, giving her the impression of their speeches having been rehearsed beforehand. “I’m afraid you don’t like him,” Joan commented.

Joan promised, and the child went out. She looked pretty when she smiled. She closed the door behind her noiselessly. “Oh, come,” struck in a youngster who was lying perfectly flat, face downwards on his bed: it was the position in which he could breathe easiest. He raised his head a couple of inches and twisted it round so as to get his mouth free. “It isn’t as bad as all that. Why, the Thirty-third swarmed into Fort Malmaison of their own accord, though ’twas like jumping into a boiling furnace, and held it for three days against pretty nearly a division. There weren’t a dozen of them left when we relieved them. They had no ammunition left. They’d just been filling up the gaps with their bodies. And they wouldn’t go back even then. We had to drag them away. ‘They shan’t pass,’ ‘They shan’t pass!’—that’s all they kept saying.” His voice had sunk to a thin whisper. Her father came to the station with her in the morning. The train was not in: and they walked up and down and talked. Suddenly she remembered: it had slipped her mind.