She looked round
the room and at Helena vigorously tackling the boxes. "I thought you
had a maid?"

"Not at all. I couldn't be bored with one."

"Do let me help you!"

"Then you'd be my maid, and I should bully you and detest you. You must
go and dress."

And Mrs. Friend found herself gently pushed out of the room. She went to
her own in some bewilderment. After having been immured for some three
years in close attendance on an invalided woman shut up in two rooms, she
was like a person walking along a dark road and suddenly caught in the
glare of motor lamps. Brought into contact with such a personality as
Helena Pitstone promised to be, she felt helpless and half blind. A
survival, too; for this world into which she had now stepped was one
quite new to her. Yet when she had first shut herself up in Lancaster
Gate she had never been conscious of any great difference between herself
and other women or girls. She had lived a very quiet life in a quiet home
before the war. Her father, a hard-working Civil Servant on a small
income, and her mother, the daughter of a Wesleyan Minister, had brought
her up strictly, yet with affection. The ways of the house were
old-fashioned, dictated by an instinctive dislike of persons who went
often to theatres and dances, of women who smoked, or played bridge, or
indulged in loud, slangy talk. Dictated, too, by a pervading "worship of
ancestors," of a preceding generation of plain evangelical men and women,
whose books survived in the little house, and whose portraits hung upon
its walls.

Then, in the first year of the war, she had married a young soldier, the
son of family friends, like-minded with her own people, a modest,
inarticulate fellow, who had been killed at Festubert. She had loved
him--oh, yes, she had loved him. But sometimes, looking back, she was
troubled to feel how shadowy he had become to her. Not in the region of
emotion. She had pined for his fondness all these years; she pined for it
still. But intellectually. If he had lived, how would he have felt
towards all these strange things that the war had brought about--the
revolutionary spirit everywhere, the changes come and coming? She did not
know; she could not imagine. And it troubled her that she could not find
any guidance for herself in her memories of him.

And as to the changes in her own sex, they seemed to have all come about
while she was sitting in a twilight room reading aloud to an old woman.
Only