rushed in, blanched and hysterical, and with her seemed to rush in
terror.

"Oh! Madame!" she cried. "As there was no more firing I went on to the
roof, and her ladyship--" She covered her face and sobbed.

G.J. jumped up.

"Go and see," said Concepcion in a blank voice, not moving. "I
can't.... It's the message straight from Potsdam that's arrived."

Chapter 35

QUEEN DEAD

G.J. emerged from the crowded and malodorous Coroner's Court with a
deep sense of the rigour and the thoroughness of British justice, and
especially of its stolidity.

There had been four inquests, all upon the bodies of air-raid victims:
a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby--all belonging to the thick
central mass of the proletariat, for a West End slum had received a
bomb full in the face--and Lady Queenie Paulle. The policemen were
stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid;
the majority of the witnesses were stolid, and in particular the
representatives of various philanthropic agencies who gave the most
minute evidence about the habits and circumstances of the slum; and
the jurymen were very stolid, and never more so than when, with stubby
fingers holding ancient pens, they had to sign quantities of blue
forms under the strict guidance of a bareheaded policeman.

The world of Queenie's acquaintances made a strange, vivid contrast
to this grey, grim, blockish world; and the two worlds regarded each
other with the wonder and the suspicious resentment of foreigners.
Queen's world came expecting to behave as at a cause celebre of, for
example, divorce. Its representatives were quite ready to tolerate
unpleasing contacts and long stretches of tedium in return for some
glimpse of the squalid and the privilege of being able to say that
they had been present at the inquest. But most of them had arrived
rather late, and they had reckoned without the Coroner, and
comparatively few obtained even admittance.

The Coroner had arrived on the stroke of the hour, in a silk hat and
frock coat, with a black bag, and had sat down at his desk and begun
to rule the proceedings with an absolutism that no High Court Judge
would have attempted. He was autocrat in a small, close, sordid room;
but he was autocrat. He had already shown his quality in some indirect
collisions with the Marquis of Lechford. The Marquis felt that he
could not stomach the exposure of his daughter's corpse in a common
mortuary with other corpses of he k