ou adorable in a tunic and breeches,
and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you
heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done
yet that a man can't do better--except getting Furny through the lines,
and nobody wants Furny _in_ the lines. And when _you're_ in them you've a
moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you
hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their
rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville
says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere.
Furny all but lost his job on the _Morning Standard_ because he was told
off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp--he _would_
have lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things
easier for _me_. Good God!--sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.

"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."

"It isn't fair on _me_," she said. "_I_'m jumpy when I'm kept back. You
don't know what it's like, Jimmy. _Don't_ turn me back."

And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that
made him burst out again.

"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than
you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor
devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me
he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried
him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."

She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend
her.

"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to
defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be
here?"

"I should like you to want me," she said.

"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."

And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't
made like that--if they _are_ men. You can't have it both ways." And he
said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence
on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.

"And _our_ chivalry is to go down before yours?"

"Can't you have both?"

"Not in war-time. _Your_ chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a
danger and a nuisance."

"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for
Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away fro