must be apart from each other.

This, if you please, was all the proposal that ever I had from the young
man.

I know all his faults.

Unscrupulous; he doesn't care how many duller and stodgier people he
uses to his own advantage. Insincere; except to his wife. To me he shows
his heart!

Vain--well, with his attractions, hasn't he cause for it? Unstable as
water, he shall not excel; except in the moment of stress and the tight
corner where a hundred more trusted men might fail, as they did the day
he won the Military Cross, when he took that German trench
single-handed, and was found with the enemy, aghast, surrendering in
heaps around him!

His dare-devil gaiety and recklessness are given value now by the
conditions of this war. And I feel that he will come back to me
unscratched at the end of the struggle, his career assured. It will be
luck, his unfailing luck as usual--no merit of his!

Meanwhile I wait hopefully.

I feed my heart's hunger, as do so many other women, on pencilled scraps
of letters scrawled across the envelope "on active service."

As for my living, I haven't gone back to Aunt Anastasia, nor have I yet
solved the weighty problem of how a woman of my class and requirements
is to live on the separation allowance. Now that Miss Million has gone
back to her old work Mrs. James Burke has taken another job; well paid,
and to a kindly mistress.

Miss Vi Vassity's "dresser" gave notice because she had been offered
higher wages by a French dancer. And London's Love, who, she says, hates
"to see any strange face putting the liquid white on her shoulders,"
offered the post to "little Smithie."

I accepted.

I live the queer, garish, artificially lighted life of the theatres now.
I dress the hair and change the Paris frocks, and lace the corsets, and
mend the pink silk fleshings of England's Premier Comedienne.

I am in her dressing-room now, busily folding and putting away her
scattered, scented garments. Even from here I can catch the roar of
applause that goes up from every part of the theatre as she comes on in
that dainty, impertinent travesty of a Highlander's uniform to sing her
latest recruiting song, "The London Skittish."

To the right of her making-up mirror there stands a massively framed,
full-length photograph of a slim lad's figure in black tights. It's the
picture of that worthless trick cyclist, who was the love of Vi
Vassity's life.

Ah, Vi! Do you think he is the only ma