ind too--and thick weather.
We've got our pace to mind and if we ever did clinch up we'd have to do
our fighting at a rate that'd make an express train giddy--and running
after a target goin' as hard as we do! That's what I call something of a
service. No! No! The Army's played out. You're for ornament now, meant
to go round Buckingham Palace and talk to nurse-maids in the Park."

"Not many nurse-maids in the Kyber Pass," his son observed.

"Frontiers--yes, I dare say," snorted Sir Peter. "A few black rag dolls
behind trees popping at you to keep your circulation going, and you with
Maxims and all, going picnics in the hills and burning down villages as
easy as pulling fire-crackers--and half the time you want help from us!
Look at South Africa!"

They looked at South Africa for some time till the dessert came and the
Plymouth Brother thankfully withdrew. After that Winn allowed himself
some margin and Lady Staines leaned back in her chair, ate grapes and
enjoyed her coffee.

The conversation became pungent, savage and enlivened on Sir Peter's
part by strange oaths.

Winn kept to sudden thrusts of irony impossible to foresee and difficult
to parry.

They drank velvety ripe old port. Sir Peter was for the moment out of
pain and anxious to assert his freedom from doctors. The conversation
shifted to submarines. Sir Peter thought them an underhand and decadent
development suited to James, who was in command of one of them.

As to aeroplanes he said that as we'd now succeeded in imitating
infernal birds and fishes--he supposed we'd soon bring off reptiles the
kind of creature the modern young would be likely to represent best.

"We shall soon have the police crawling on their bellies up and down the
Strand hiding behind lamp-posts," finished Sir Peter. "Call that kind of
thing science! It's an inverted Noah's Ark! That's what it is! And when
you get it all going to suit yourself, there'll be another flood, and
serve you all damned well right. I shall enjoy seeing you drown!"

Winn replied that you had to fight with your head now and that people
who fought with their fists were about as dangerous as stuffed rabbits.

Sir Peter replied that in the end everything came down to blood, how
much you'd got yourself and how much you could get out of the enemy.

Lady Staines was slightly afraid of leaving them in this atmosphere, but
at last she reluctantly withdrew to the hall, where she listened to the
varying shades of