This was good news.  Over the telephone wire we agreed that the letter was a justification of our yesterday’s little merrymaking.  Obviously, I told her, he would live to fight another day.  She was of opinion that he had done enough fighting already.  If he went on much longer, the poor boy would get quite tired out, to say nothing of the danger of being wounded again.  The King ought to let him rest on his laurels and make others who hadn’t worked a quarter as hard do the remainder of the war.

“Perhaps,” I said light-heartedly, “Leonard will drop the hint when he writes to thank the King for the nice cross.”

She said that I was laughing at her, and rang off in the best of spirits.

In the evening came Betty, inviting herself to dinner.  She had been on night duty at the hospital, and I had not seen her for some days.  The sight of her, bright-eyed and brave, fresh and young, always filled me with happiness.  I felt her presence like wine and the sea wind and the sunshine.  So greatly did her vitality enrich me, that sometimes I called myself a horrid old vampire.

As soon as she had greeted me, she said in her downright way: 

“So Leonard Boyce has got his V.C.”

“Yes,” said I.  “What do you think of it?”

A spot of colour rose to her cheek.  “I’m very glad.  It’s no use, Majy, pretending that I ignore his existence.  I don’t and I can’t.  Because I loved and married someone else doesn’t alter the fact that I once cared for him, does it?”

“Many people,” said I, judicially, “find out that they have been mistaken as to the extent and nature of their own sentiments.”

“I wasn’t mistaken,” she replied, sitting down on the piano stool, her hands on the leathern seat, her neatly shod feet stretched out in front of her, just as she had sat on her wedding eve talking nonsense to Willie Connor.  “I wasn’t mistaken.  I was never addicted to silly school-girl fancies.  I know my own mind.  I cared a lot for Leonard Boyce.”

“Eh bien?” said I.

“Well, don’t you see what I’m driving at?”

“I don’t a bit.”

She sighed.  “Oh, dear!  How dull some people are!  Don’t you see that, when an affair like that is over, a woman likes to get some evidence of the man’s fine qualities, in order to justify her for having once cared for him?”

“Quite so.  Yet—­” I felt argumentative.  The breach, as you know, between Betty and Boyce was wrapped in exasperating obscurity.  “Yet, on the other hand,” said I, “she might welcome evidence of his worthlessness, so as to justify her for having thrown him over.”

“If a woman isn’t a dam-fool already,” said Betty, “and I don’t think I’m one, she doesn’t like to feel that she ever made a dam-fool of herself.  She is proud of her instincts and her judgments and the sensitive, emotional intelligence that is hers.  When all these seem to have gone wrong, it’s pleasing to realise that originally they went right.  It soothes one’s self-respect, one’s pride.  I know now that all these blind perceptions in me went straight to certain magnificent essentials—­those that make the great, strong, fearless fighting man.  That’s attractive to a woman, you know.  At any rate, to an independent barbarian like myself—­”