the astounding desolating tales of
the handsome boy about folly, ignorance, stupidity and martyrdoms at
Suvla.

He said, with the peculiar polite restraint that in him masked emotion
and acrimony:

"Yes, I'm glad it's a success. But the machinery of it is perhaps just
slightly out of proportion to the results. If people had given to
the hospitals what they have spent on clothes to come here and what
they've paid painters so that they could see themselves on the walls,
we should have made twenty times as much as we have made--a hundred
times as much. Why, good god! Queen, the whole afternoon's takings
wouldn't buy what you're wearing now, to say nothing of the five
hundred other women here." His eye rested on the badge of her
half-brother's regiment which she had had reproduced in diamonds.

At this juncture he heard himself addressed in a hearty, heavy voice
as "G.J., old soul." An officer with the solitary crown on his
sleeve, bald, stoutish, but probably not more than forty-five, touched
him--much gentler than he spoke--on the shoulder.

"Craive, my son! You back! Well, it's startling to see you at a
picture-show, anyhow."

The Major, saluting Lady Queenie as a distant acquaintance, retorted:

"Morally, you owe me a guinea, my dear G.J. I called at the flat, and
the young woman there told me you'd surely be here."

While they were talking G.J. could hear Queenie Paulle and Molder:

"Where are you back from?"

"Suvla, Lady Queenie."

"You must be oozing with interest and actuality. Tell G.J. to bring
you to tea one day, quite, quite soon, will you? _I_'ll tell him."
And Molder murmured something fatuously conventional. G.J. showed
decorously that he had caught his own name. Whereupon Lady Queenie,
instead of naming a day for tea, addressed him almost bitterly:

"G.J., what's come over you? What in the name of Pan do you suppose
all you males are fighting each other for?" She paused effectively.
"Good god! If I began to dress like a housemaid the Germans would
be in London in a month. Our job as women is quite delicate
enough without you making it worse by any damned sentimental
superficiality.... I want you to bring Mr. Molder to tea _to-morrow_,
and if you can't come he must come alone...."

With a last strange look at Molder she retired into the glitter of the
crowded larger room.

"She been driving any fresh men to suicide lately?" Major Craive
demanded acidly under his breath.

G.J. raised his ey