sees young women students wheeling convalescent soldiers about
Oxford. I don't believe there is a woman or girl in Oxford who isn't
doing something for the war."

"Yes, but it is the busy women who almost always have time for more
work," said Lady Dashwood.

"Now, I suppose Gwendolen is doing nothing and eating her head off, as
the phrase goes," said Mrs. Potten.

Lady Dashwood was not to be drawn. "Talking of doing something," she
said, to draw Mrs. Potten off the subject, and there was a touch of
weariness in her voice: "I think a Frenchwoman can beat an Englishwoman
any day at 'doing.' I am speaking now of the working classes. I have a
French maid now who does twice the work that any English maid would do.
I picked her up at the beginning of the war. Her husband was killed and
she was stranded with two children. I've put the two children into a
Catholic school in Kent and I have them in the holidays. Well, Louise
makes practically all my things, makes her own clothes and the
children's, and besides that we have made shirts and pyjamas till I
could cut them out blindfolded. She's an object lesson to all maids."

Lady Dashwood was successful, Mrs. Potten's attention was diverted, only
unfortunately the word "maid" stimulated her to draw up an exhaustive
inventory of all the servants she had ever had at Potten End, and she
was doing this in her best Bradshaw style when Lady Dashwood exclaimed
that she had a wire to send off and must go and do it.

"I ought to be going too," said Mrs. Potten, her brain reeling for a
moment at this sudden interruption to her train of thought. She rose
with some indecision, leaving her bag on the floor. Then she stooped and
picked up her bag and left her umbrella; and then at last securing both
bag and umbrella, the two ladies made their way down the stairs and
went back into St. Aldates.

All the time that Mrs. Potten had been running through a list of the
marriages, births, etc., of all her former servants, Lady Dashwood was
contriving a telegram to Lady Belinda Scott. It was difficult to
compose, partly because it had to be both elusive and yet firm, and
partly because Mrs. Potten's voice kept on interrupting any flow of
consecutive thought.

When the two ladies had reached the post-office the wire was completed
in Lady Dashwood's brain.

"Good-bye," said Mrs. Potten, just outside the threshold of the door.
"And if you see Bernard--I believe he means to go to tea at the
Hardin