rulers; perhaps she
would even make weak attempts to obtain a situation in Switzerland or in
Germany. Perhaps she would buy a knife or a revolver. Perhaps presently
she would begin to hover about Windsor or Sandringham when peace was
made, and the German cousins came visiting again....

Into Cissie's mind came the image of the thing that might be; Letty,
shabby, draggled, with her sharp bright prettiness become haggard, an
assassin dreamer, still dependent on Mr. Britling, doing his work rather
badly, in a distraught unpunctual fashion.

She must be told, she must be convinced soon, or assuredly she would
become an eccentric, a strange character, a Matching's Easy Miss
Flite....

Section 3

Cissie could think more clearly of Letty's mind than of her own.

She herself was in a tangle. She had grown to be very fond of Mr.
Direck, and to have a profound trust and confidence in him, and her
fondness seemed able to find no expression at all except a constant
girding at his and America's avoidance of war. She had fallen in love
with him when he was wearing fancy dress; she was a young woman with a
stronger taste for body and colour than she supposed; what indeed she
resented about him, though she did not know it, was that he seemed never
disposed to carry the spirit of fancy dress into everyday life. To begin
with he had touched both her imagination and senses, and she wanted him
to go on doing that. Instead of which he seemed lapsing more and more
into reiterated assurances of devotion and the flat competent discharge
of humanitarian duties. Always nowadays he was trying to persuade her
that what he was doing was the right and honourable thing for him to do;
what he did not realise, what indeed she did not realise, was the
exasperation his rightness and reasonableness produced in her. When he
saw he exasperated her he sought very earnestly to be righter and
reasonabler and more plainly and demonstrably right and reasonable than
ever.

Withal, as she felt and perceived, he was such a good thing, such a very
good thing; so kind, so trustworthy, with a sort of slow strength, with
a careful honesty, a big good childishness, a passion for fairness. And
so helpless in her hands. She could lash him and distress him. Yet she
could not shake his slowly formed convictions.

When Cissie had dreamt of the lover that fate had in store for her in
her old romantic days, he was to be _perfect_ always, he and she were
always to be