atching them. For an instant
she was on the verge of telling him the truth. But Esther was
empirically aware of the importance of moods in the development of
truth; and she said with great heartiness: "I am tellin' you, yes! She
come. I make her! But how you get away from here? You gotta wait till
the war finish. And where go? Germany?"

"What for?" he had demanded with tremendous astonishment.

Esther looked at him then with some curiosity. She had all the news from
Constantinople, and in the light of that news it seemed incredible to
her that any one should doubt the triumph of the Central Powers. There
would be nowhere else to go, in her opinion, unless one fled to America.

"Home, of course," he had said, and of a sudden had experienced an
almost physical sickness of longing for the humid foggy land in the
Northern Sea, the land of dark green headlands showing chalk-white
below, of hedges like thick black ropes on the landscape, with sunken
roads between, of little towns of gray and black stone with the dark red
roofs and stumpy spires against the sky of clouds like heaps of
comfortable cushions. He had been amazed at her cool suggestion that
they go to Germany, and she had been amazed at him. For she had all the
news from Constantinople, news that told her that the British fleets
were at the bottom of the sea, that the millions in England were
starving, the King fled to America, and that the great Kaiser in his
palace in Berlin was setting out on his triumphal march to London to be
crowned Czar of Europe. And why then should he not go to Germany? That
was what she would do. She looked at him curiously as he said "Home!"
not understanding, of course, the meaning of the word. She had a house,
but the subtle implications of the word home, the word saturated with a
thousand years of local traditions and sympathies, the word that is the
invisible centre of our world, she did not comprehend. For her,
patriotism was a dim and unfamiliar perplexity. She had no abstract
ideas at all. She could not read very well. She personified the things
in her heart. To her they were men as real as her husband and Mr.
Spokesly himself. Husband, house, money, sun, moon, sea, and earth--on
these concrete manifestations of existence she based an uncurious
philosophy. And it must be understood that love was very much the same.
Esther had none of Evanthia's untutored theatricality. She never saw
herself as the Queen of Sheba or the mistress