The assembly had a further and particular reason for serious pride.  It was getting on with the war, and in a most novel way.  Private views are customarily views gratis.  But the entry to this private view cost a guinea, and there was absolutely no free list.  The guineas were going to the support of the Lechford Hospitals in France.  The happy idea was G.J.’s own, and Lady Queenie Paulle and her mother had taken the right influential measures to ensure its grandiose execution.  A queen had visited the private view for half an hour.  Thus all the very well-dressed and very expensively-dressed women, and all the men who admired and desired them as they moved, in voluptuous perfection, amid dazzling pictures with the soft illumination of screened skylights above and the reflections in polished parquet below—­all of both sexes were comfortably conscious of virtue in the undoubted fact that they were helping to support two renowned hospitals where at that very moment dissevered legs and arms were being thrown into buckets.

In a little room at the end of the galleries was a small but choice collection of the etchings of Felicien Rops:  a collection for connoisseurs, as the critics were to point out in the newspapers the next morning.  For Rops, though he had an undeniable partiality for subjects in which ugly and prurient women displayed themselves in nothing but the inessentials of costume, was a classic before whom it was necessary to bow the head in homage.

G.J. was in this room in company with a young and handsome Staff officer, Lieutenant Molder, home on convalescent leave from Suvla Bay.  Mr. Molder had left Oxford in order to join the army; he had behaved admirably, and well earned the red shoulder-ornaments which pure accident had given him.  He was a youth of artistic and literary tastes, with genuine ambitions quite other than military, and after a year of horrible existence in which he had hungered for the arts more than for anything, he was solacing and renewing himself in the contemplation of all the masterpieces that London could show.  He greatly esteemed G.J.’s connoisseurship, and G.J. had taken him in hand.  At the close of a conscientious and highly critical round of the galleries they had at length reached the Rops room, and they were discussing every aspect of Rops except his lubricity, when Lady Queenie Paulle approached them from behind.  Molder was the first to notice her and turn.  He blushed.

“Well, Queen,” said G.J., who had already had several conversations with her in the galleries that day and on the previous days of preparation.

She replied: 

“Well, I hope you’re satisfied with the results of your beautiful idea.”