“Yes, I’m glad it’s a success.  But the machinery of it is perhaps just slightly out of proportion to the results.  If people had given to the hospitals what they have spent on clothes to come here and what they’ve paid painters so that they could see themselves on the walls, we should have made twenty times as much as we have made—­a hundred times as much.  Why, good god!  Queen, the whole afternoon’s takings wouldn’t buy what you’re wearing now, to say nothing of the five hundred other women here.”  His eye rested on the badge of her half-brother’s regiment which she had had reproduced in diamonds.

At this juncture he heard himself addressed in a hearty, heavy voice as “G.J., old soul.”  An officer with the solitary crown on his sleeve, bald, stoutish, but probably not more than forty-five, touched him—­much gentler than he spoke—­on the shoulder.

“Craive, my son!  You back!  Well, it’s startling to see you at a picture-show, anyhow.”

The Major, saluting Lady Queenie as a distant acquaintance, retorted: 

“Morally, you owe me a guinea, my dear G.J.  I called at the flat, and the young woman there told me you’d surely be here.”

While they were talking G.J. could hear Queenie Paulle and Molder: 

“Where are you back from?”

“Suvla, Lady Queenie.”

“You must be oozing with interest and actuality.  Tell G.J. to bring you to tea one day, quite, quite soon, will you? I’ll tell him.”  And Molder murmured something fatuously conventional.  G.J. showed decorously that he had caught his own name.  Whereupon Lady Queenie, instead of naming a day for tea, addressed him almost bitterly: 

“G.J., what’s come over you?  What in the name of Pan do you suppose all you males are fighting each other for?” She paused effectively.  “Good god!  If I began to dress like a housemaid the Germans would be in London in a month.  Our job as women is quite delicate enough without you making it worse by any damned sentimental superficiality....  I want you to bring Mr. Molder to tea to-morrow, and if you can’t come he must come alone....”

With a last strange look at Molder she retired into the glitter of the crowded larger room.

“She been driving any fresh men to suicide lately?” Major Craive demanded acidly under his breath.

G.J. raised his eyebrows.

Then:  “That’s not you, Frankie!” said the Major with a start of recognition towards the Staff lieutenant.

“Yes, sir,” said Molder.

They shook hands.  At the previous Christmas they had lain out together on the cliffs of the east coast in wild weather, waiting to repel a phantom army of thirty thousand Germans.

“It was the red hat put me off,” the Major explained.

“Not my fault, sir,” Molder smiled.

“Devilish glad to see you, my boy.”

G.J. murmured to Molder: 

“You don’t want to go and have tea with her, do you?”