"You are quite right. This war has certainly brought out the best in our women. The South African War brought out the worst. My goodness, you should have seen the Mount Nelson Hotel at Capetown in those days! But they have been wonderful this time--wonderful. I love them all--the bus-conductors, the ticket-punchers, the lift-girls--one of them nearly shot me right through the roof of Harrod's the other day--and the window-cleaners and the page-girls and the railway-portresses! I divide my elderly heart among them. And I met a bunch of munition girls the other day, Bobby, coming home from work. They were all young, and most of them were pretty. Their faces and hands were stained a bright orange-colour with picric acid, and will be, I suppose, until the Boche is booted back into his stye. In other words, they had deliberately sacrificed their good looks for the duration of the war. That takes a bit of doing, I know, innocent bachelor though I am. But bless you, they weren't worrying. They waved their orange-coloured hands to me, and pointed to their orange-coloured faces, and laughed. They were _proud_ of them; they were doing their bit. They nearly made me cry, Bobby. Yes, we are all in it now; and those of us who come out of it are going to find this old island of ours a wonderfully changed place to live in." "How? Why?" enquired Bobby. Possibly he was interested in Wagstaffe's unusual expansiveness: possibly he hoped to steer the conversation away from the topic of V.A.D.'s--possibly towards it. You never know. "Well," said Wagstaffe, "we are all going to understand one another a great deal better after this war." "Who? Labour and Capital, and so on?"