ve conveyed anything to her except by graphic
gesticulation and grimace.

I accepted the fact at the outset that my soft and seductive tones
could never penetrate Millie's stone-deafness. Only the loudest and
angriest remarks are audible to Millie, so I preserve an attitude of
silent facial amiability in all my relations with her.

BALAAM could not have looked more surprised than did Millie this
evening when, in the act of clearing away my latest meal, she heard
me say, "Leave the matches."

She stopped dead and looked at me over the tray of dirty crockery. Her
expression was not unfriendly.

"But I got t' look after myself," she explained; "I'd be all done up
if I hadn't they matches in the morning to light the fire and all. You
wouldn't get no bath-water."

"I want to smoke," I said obstinately.

She kept her hand over the box of matches. She had not heard. I made
intelligent signs illustrative of the lighting of a cigarette. Millie
told me, in pure Cornish:

"You can only get a box at a time now, and half-a-pound o' sugar I
gets when I shows my card, and they do say we won't get that--only
quarter soon. I'd like to get at that KAYSER! I'd smash him up, I
would!" She said this in the kindest, most benign way, with a smile
as nearly caressing as a smile without front teeth can be. "He'd
come short off if I got to him! And he deserves it, I'm sure," she
concluded, as she departed--with the matches....

A long walk over the Cornish cliffs in the gusty North wind from
the Atlantic had made me drowsy, and as I sat before the fire my
thoughts wandered from Russian politics and the Italian situation
to Millie--and the "KAYSER": Millie, who was short of stature and
round-backed, who showed her fifty-odd years unflinchingly to the
world; Millie with her felt slippers and her overall and coarse hands;
Millie, the possessor of a sugar-card--and the mighty War Lord, stern
and implacable, trying to subdue the world to his will. And Millie
only wished she could get near him to smash him up--"the KAYSER would
come short off."...

* * * * *

The lamp-lit cottage room faded; the sound of November winds and
swirling leaves outside died away. For a moment I peered through
a greyish-blue moving mist--it might have been cigarette smoke;
gradually I distinguished forms and colours beyond; then the fog
lifted and I looked upon an electrically-lighted room, with the
aspect of an office _de luxe_.