“So am I.”

“Besides, I’m not so old, sir.  I’m only forty-two.”

“The prime of life,” said I.

“Then why won’t they take me, sir?”

If there had been no age limit and no medical examination Marigold would have re-enlisted as John Smith, on the outbreak of war, without a moment’s consideration of the position of his wife and myself.  And Mrs. Marigold, a soldier’s wife of twenty years’ standing, would have taken it, just like myself, as a matter of course.  But as he could not re-enlist, he pestered the War Office (just as I did) and I pestered for him to give him military employment.  And all in vain.

“Why don’t they take me, sir?  When I see these fellows with three stripes on their arms, and looking at them and wondering at them as if they were struck three stripes by lightning, and calling themselves Sergeants and swanking about and letting their men waddle up to their gun like cows—­and when I see them, as I’ve done with your eyes—­watch one of their men pass by an officer in the street without saluting, and don’t kick the blighter to—­to—­ to barracks—­it fairly makes me sick.  And I ask myself, sir, what I’ve done that I should be loafing here instead of serving my country.”

“You’ve somehow mislaid an eye and a hand and gone and got a tin head.  That’s what you’ve done,” said I.  “And the War Office has a mark against you as a damned careless fellow.”

“Tin head or no tin head,” he grumbled, “I could teach those mother’s darlings up there the difference between a battery of artillery and a skittle-ally.”

“I believe you’ve mentioned the matter to them already,” I observed softly.

Marigold met my eye for a second and then looked rather sheepish.  I had heard of a certain wordy battle between him and a Territorial Sergeant whom he had set out to teach.  Marigold encountered a cannonade of blasphemous profanity, new, up-to-date, scientific, against which the time-worn expletives in use during his service days were ineffectual.  He was routed with heavy loss.

“This is a war of the young,” I continued.  “New men, new guns, new notions.  Even a new language,” I insinuated.

“I wish ’em joy of their language,” said Marigold.  Then seeing that I was mildly amusing myself at his expense, he asked me stiffly if there was anything more that he could do for me, and on my saying no, he replied “Thank you, sir,” most correctly and left the room.

On the 3d of March Betty Fairfax came to tea.

Of all the young women of Wellingsford she was my particular favourite.  She was so tall and straight, with a certain Rosalind boyishness about her that made for charm.  I am not yet, thank goodness, one of the fossils who hold up horror-stricken hands at the independent ways of the modern young woman.  If it were not for those same independent ways the mighty work that English women are doing in this war would be left undone.  Betty Fairfax was breezily independent.  She had a little money of her own and lived, when it suited her, with a well-to-do and comfortable aunt.  She was two and twenty.  I shall try to tell you more about her, as I go on.