ders it was sense of duty that prevailed. That, at all
events, was English. The country must be saved. To their sons and
daughters it was the originality, the novelty that gradually appealed.
Mrs. Denton's Fridays became a new sensation. It came to be the chic and
proper thing to appear at them in shades of mauve or purple. A pushing
little woman in Hanover Street designed the "Denton" bodice, with hanging
sleeves and square-cut neck. The younger men inclined towards a coat
shaped to the waist with a roll collar.

Joan sighed. It looked as if the word had been passed round to treat the
whole thing as a joke. Mrs. Denton took a different view.

"Nothing better could have happened," she was of opinion. "It means that
their hearts are in it."

The stone hall was still vibrating to the voices of the last departed
guests. Joan was seated on a footstool before the fire in front of Mrs.
Denton's chair.

"It's the thing that gives me greatest hope," she continued. "The
childishness of men and women. It means that the world is still young,
still teachable."

"But they're so slow at their lessons," grumbled Joan. "One repeats it
and repeats it; and then, when one feels that surely now at least one has
drummed it into their heads, one finds they have forgotten all that one
has ever said."

"Not always forgotten," answered Mrs. Denton; "mislaid, it may be, for
the moment. An Indian student, the son of an old Rajah, called on me a
little while ago. He was going back to organize a system of education
among his people. 'My father heard you speak when you were over in
India,' he told me. 'He has always been thinking about it.' Thirty
years ago it must have been, that I undertook that mission to India. I
had always looked back upon it as one of my many failures."

"But why leave it to his son," argued Joan. "Why couldn't the old man
have set about it himself, instead of wasting thirty precious years?"

"I should have preferred it, myself," agreed Mrs. Denton. "I remember
when I was a very little girl my mother longing for a tree upon the lawn
underneath which she could sit. I found an acorn and planted it just in
the right spot. I thought I would surprise her. I happened to be in the
neighbourhood last summer, and I walked over. There was such a nice old
lady sitting under it, knitting stockings. So you see it wasn't wasted."

"I wouldn't mind the waiting," answered Joan, "if it were not for the
sorro