women were behaving while doing war-work. This animation subsided when we got up from the table. In the drawing-room she lit the fire, “as the night felt a bit chilly and a fire would make the room more cheerful.” Probably she was hoping to spend a cosy evening with me; but I made a bad beginning, for the lid fell off the coffeepot and cracked one of the little blue and yellow cups, and when Aunt Evelyn suggested that we might play one of our old games of cribbage or halma, I said I didn’t feel like that sort of thing. Somehow I couldn’t get myself to behave affectionately towards her, and she had irritated me by making uncomplimentary remarks about Markington’s paper, a copy of which was lying on the table. (She said it was written by people who were mad with their own self-importance and she couldn’t understand how I could read such a paper.) Picking it up I went grumpily upstairs and spent the next ten minutes trying to teach Popsy the parrot how to say “Stop the War.” But he only put his head down to be scratched, and afterwards obliged me with his well-known rendering of Aunt Evelyn calling the cats. On her way up to bed she came in (with a glass of milk) and told me that she was sure I wasn’t feeling well. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if I were to go to the seaside for a few days’ golf? But this suggestion only provided me with further evidence that it was no earthly use expecting her to share my views about the War. Games of golf indeed! I glowered at the glass of milk and had half a mind to throw it out of the window. Afterwards I decided that I might as well drink it, and did so.
Late on a sultry afternoon, when returning from a mutinous-minded walk, I stopped to sit in Butley Churchyard. From Butley Hill one looks across a narrow winding valley, and that afternoon the woods and orchards suddenly made me feel almost as fond of them as I’d been when I was in France. While I was resting on a flat-topped old tombstone I recovered something approximate to peace of mind. Gazing at my immediate surroundings, I felt that “joining the great majority” was a homely—almost a comforting—idea. Here death differed from extinction in modern warfare. I ascertained from the nearest headstone