“Well, it’s not so easy, you know.  It was a four and a half pound shell, filled with gun-cotton slabs and shrapnel bullets packed in sawdust.  The charge was black powder in a paper bag, and you stuck it at the bottom end of the pipe and put a bit of fuse into the touch-hole—­but, of course, you must take care it penetrates the charge.  The shell-fuse has a pinner with a detonator with the right length of fuse shoved into it; you wrap some clay round the end of the fuse to stop the flash of the charge from detonating the shell.  Well, then you load the shell—­”

She comprehended simply nothing, and the man, professionally absorbed, seemed to have no perception that she was comprehending nothing.  She scarcely even listened.  Her face was set in a courteous, formal smile; but all the time she was thinking that the man, in spite of his qualities, must be lacking in character to give a watch away to a woman to whom he had not been talking for ten minutes.  His lack of character was shown also in his unshamed confession concerning his real enemy.  Some men would bare their souls to a cocotte in a fashion that was flattering neither to themselves nor to the cocotte, and Christine never really respected such men.  She did not really respect this man, but respected, and stood in awe of, his mysticism; and, further, her instinct to satisfy him, to make a spoiled boy of him, was not in the least weakened.  Then, just as the man was in the middle of his description of the functioning of the trench mortar, the telephone-bell rang, and Christine excused herself.

The telephone was in the bedroom, not by the bedside—­for such a situation had its inconveniences—­but in the farthest corner, between the window and the washstand.  As she went to the telephone she was preoccupied by one of the major worries of her vocation, the worry of keeping clients out of each other’s sight.  She wondered who could be telephoning to her on Sunday evening.  Not Gilbert, for Gilbert never telephoned on Sunday except in the morning.  She insisted, of course, on his telephoning to her daily, or almost daily.  She did this to several of her more reliable friends, for there was no surer way of convincing them of the genuineness of her regard for them than to vituperate them when they failed to keep her informed of their health, their spirits, and their doings.  In the case of Gilbert, however, her insistence had entirely ceased to be a professional device; she adored him violently.

The telephoner was Gilbert.  He made an amazing suggestion; he asked her to come across to his flat, where she had never been and where he had never asked her to go.  It had been tacitly and quite amiably understood between them that he was not one who invited young ladies to his own apartments.

Christine cautiously answered that she was not sure whether she could come.

“Are you alone?” he asked pleasantly.

“Yes, quite.”