her country whatsoever.  As for loving it, she loved her children and her husband, and she had a sort of mild, cat-like affection for her garden and her tree of Heaven and her house; but the idea of loving England was absurd; you might just as well talk of loving the Archbishopric of Canterbury.  She who once sat in peace under the tree of Heaven with her Times newspaper, and flicked the affairs of the nation from her as less important than the stitching on her baby’s frock, now talked and thought and dreamed of nothing else.  She was sad, not because her son Nicholas’s time of safety was dwindling week by week, but because England was in danger; she was worried, not because Lord Kitchener was practically asking her to give up her son Michael, but because she had found that the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, and that she was classed with her incompetent sisters as too old to wait on wounded soldiers.  Every morning she left her household to old Nanna’s care and went down to the City with Anthony, and worked till evening in a room behind his office, receiving, packing, and sending off great cases of food and clothing to the Belgian soldiers.

Anthony was sad and worried, not because he had three sons, all well under twenty-seven, but simply and solely because the Government persisted in buying the wrong kind of timber—­timber that swelled and shrank again—­for rifles and gun-carriages, and because officials wouldn’t listen to him when he tried to tell them what he knew about timber, and because the head of a department had talked to him about private firms and profiteering.  As if any man with three sons under twenty-seven would want to make a profit out of the War; and as if they couldn’t cut down everybody’s profits if they took the trouble.  They might cut his to the last cent so long as we had gun-carriages that would carry guns and rifles that would shoot.  He knew what he was talking about and they didn’t.

And Frances said he was right.  He always had been right.  She who had once been impatient over his invariable, irritating rightness, loved it now.  She thought and said that if there were a few men like Anthony at the head of departments we should win the War.  We were losing it for want of precisely that specialized knowledge and that power of organization in which Anthony excelled.  She was proud of him, not because he was her husband and the father of her children, but because he was a man who could help England.  They were both proud of Michael and Nicholas and John, not because they were their sons, but because they were men who could fight for England.

They found that they loved England with a secret, religious, instinctive love.  Two feet of English earth, the ground that a man might stand and fight for, became, mysteriously and magically, dearer to them than their home.  They loved England more than their own life or the lives of their children.  Long ago they had realized that fathers do not beget children nor mothers bear them merely to gratify themselves.  Now, in September and October, they were realizing that children are not begotten and born for their own profit and pleasure either.