We were alone in the library. She listened to me, her silver hair and handsome face bent slightly forward above a piece of fine embroidery. Outwardly emotionless, she symbolized the patrician privileges for whose preservation I had chucked bombs at Germans and carelessly offered myself as a target for a sniper. When I had blurted out my opinion that life was preferable to the Roll of Honour she put aside her reticence like a rich cloak. “But death is nothing,” she said. “Life, after all, is only the beginning. And those who are killed in the War—they help us from up there. They are helping us to win.” I couldn’t answer that; this “other world,” of which she was so certain, was something I had forgotten about since I was wounded. Expecting no answer, she went on with a sort of inflexible sympathy (almost “as if my number was already up,” as I would have expressed it), “It isn’t as though you were heir to a great name. No; I can’t see any definite reason for your keeping out of danger. But, of course, you can only decide a thing like that for yourself.”
I went up to the Clematis Room feeling caddishly estranged and cynical; wondering whether the Germans “up there” were doing anything definite to impede the offensive operations of the Allied Powers. But Lady Asterisk wasn’t hard-hearted. She only wanted me “to do the right thing.” … I began to wish that I could talk candidly to someone. There was too much well-behaved acquiescence at Nutwood Manor; and whatever the other officers there thought about the War, they kept it to themselves; they had done their bit for the time being and were conventional and correct, as if the eye of their Colonel was upon them.
Social experience at Nutwood was varied by an occasional visitor. One evening I sat next to the new arrival, a fashionable young woman whose husband (as I afterwards ascertained) was campaigning in the Cameroons. Her manner implied that she was ready to take me into her