lleys living in such a vulgar, restless-looking house."

Pamela laughed. "Do you think all the little pepper-pot towers must have
an effect on the soul? I doubt it, my dear."

"Still," said Jean, "I think more will be expected at the end from the
people who have all their lives lived in and looked at lovely places. It
always worries me, the thought of people who live in the dark places of
big cities--children especially, growing up like 'plants in mines that
never saw the sun.' It is so dreadful that sometimes I feel I _must_ go
and help."

"What could you do?"

"That's what common sense always asks. I could do nothing alone, but if
all the decent people tried their hardest it would make a difference....
It's the thought of the cruelty in the world that makes me sick. It's
the hardest thing for me to keep from being happy. Great-aunt Alison
said I had a light nature. Even when I ought to be sad my heart jumps up
in the most unreasonable way, and I am happy. But sometimes it feels as
if we comfortable people are walking on a flowery meadow that is really
a great quaking morass, and underneath there is black slime full of
unimagined horrors. A paragraph in the newspaper makes a crack and you
see down: women who take money for keeping little babies and allow them
to die, men who torture: tales of horror and terror. The War made a
tremendous crack. It seemed then as if we were all to be drawn into the
slime, as if cruelty had got its fangs into the heart of the world. When
you knelt to pray at nights you could only cry and cry. The courage of
the men who grappled in the slime with the horrors was the one thing
that kept one from despair. And the fact that they could _laugh_. You
know about the dying man who told his nurse some joke and finished,
'This is _the_ War for laughs.'"

Pamela nodded. "It hardly bears thinking of yet--the War and the
fighters. Later on it will become the greatest of all sagas. But I want
to hear about Priorsford people. That's a clean, cheerful subject. Who
lives in the pretty house with the long ivy-covered front?"

"The Knowe it is called. The Jowetts live there--retired Anglo-Indians.
Mr. Jowett is a funny, kind little man with a red face and rather a
nautical air. He is so busy that often it is afternoon before he reads
his morning's letters."

"What does he do?"

"I don't think he does anything much: taps the barometer, advises the
gardener, fusses with fowls, potters in the garden, t