The young woman, slim and pale, had long since gone out of mourning.  She was most brilliantly attired, and no detail lacked to the perfection of her modish outfit.  Indeed, just as she was, she would have made a marvellous mannequin, except for the fact that mannequins are not usually allowed to perfume themselves in business hours.  Her thin, rather high voice, which somehow matched her complexion and carriage, had its customary tone of amiable insolence, and her tired, drooping eyes their equivocal glance, as she faced the bearded and grave middle-aged bachelor and the handsome, muscular boy; even the boy was older than Queen, yet she seemed to condescend to them as if she were an immortal from everlasting to everlasting and could teach both of them all sorts of useful things about life.  Nobody could have guessed from that serene demeanour that her self-satisfaction was marred by any untoward detail whatever.  Yet it was.  All her frocks were designed to conceal a serious defect which seriously disturbed her:  she was low-breasted.

G.J. said bluntly: 

“May I present Mr. Molder?—­Lady Queenie Paulle.”

And he said to himself, secretly annoyed: 

“Dash the infernal chit.  That’s what she’s come for.  Now she’s got it.”

She gave the slightest, dubious nod to Molder, who, having faced fighting Turks with an equanimity equal to Queenie’s own, was yet considerably flurried by the presence and the gaze of this legendary girl.  Queenie, enjoying his agitation, but affecting to ignore him, began to talk quickly in the vein of exclusive gossip; she mentioned in a few seconds the topics of the imminent entry of Bulgaria into the war, the maturing Salonika expedition, the confidential terrible utterances of K. on recruiting, and, of course, the misfortune (due to causes which Queenie had at her finger-ends) round about Loos.  Then in regard to the last she suddenly added, quite unjustifiably implying that the two phenomena were connected:  “You know, mother’s hospitals are frightfully full just now....  But, of course, you do know.  That’s why I’m so specially glad to-day’s such a success.”

Thus in a moment, and with no more than ten phrases, she had conveyed the suggestion that while mere soldiers, ageing men-about-town, and the ingenuous mass of the public might and did foolishly imagine the war to be a simple affair, she herself, by reason of her intelligence and her private sources of knowledge, had a full, unique apprehension of its extremely complex and various formidableness.  G.J. resented the familiar attitude, and he resented Queenie’s very appearance and the appearance of the entire opulent scene.  In his head at that precise instant were not only the statistics of mortality and major operations at the Lechford Hospitals, but also the astounding desolating tales of the handsome boy about folly, ignorance, stupidity and martyrdoms at Suvla.

He said, with the peculiar polite restraint that in him masked emotion and acrimony: