"Don't go, Emily. Don't shove off for a second. I only get wound up like this once in a blue moon, and I'd better get it off my chest now once and for all. Don't imagine I think these Miss Smedleys represent women war-workers. I know they're a minority, but they represent a type. I know something about the other sort--the ones who've helped us to bash the Hun, and they make me feel like a piffling slacker sometimes. How would you like to stand on your feet for twelve hours a day doing acetylene gas welding, or ride eighty miles carrying spare parts on a stink-bike through a snow blizzard--not once, but as a daily routine? I was shipmates with a bloke whose sister did that for two consecutive years. How would you like swabbing out a gangrened wound in a part of a man's anatomy polite civilisation makes him hide under clothes---? Don't raise your eyebrows, Emily! The point I'm driving at is that thousands of women do these things, and somehow manage to remain women----" He mused reminiscently upon a then recent article in Blackwood's Magazine--"Even when they pull off their petticoats and put on breeches to plough an acre a day." "I am sorry," said Lady Manners, on the threshold of the hall. "But I quite fail to see the application of all this--this rant." "It applies to Josephine Smedley and her kidney," replied the seeker-after-ideal-womanhood. "It is my 'statement in mitigation.' You, my dear Emily, having donned the black cap and condemned me to a tea-party with the lady in question, cannot do less than listen to my views." Graeme beamed at her irate ladyship, his ill-humour blown away on the winds of vehemence. "And now here is Malcolm bowed down with the affairs of the nation." Sir Malcolm Manners, who wore a preoccupied air and carried a sheaf of letters in his hand, entered as Graeme spoke. He was a meagre individual with absent blue eyes and a drooping moustache tinted by nicotine. His thin grey hair was parted unsymmetrically down the centre, and one wisp, perpetually overlooked or rebellious against restraint, stuck up from the crown like a cock's tail in miniature. He stopped when he saw his wife and referred fussily to the letters he carried, as if to refresh his mind from notes preparatory to making a speech. "We must go up to town for a few days, Emily. These fellows are going to muddle everything without someone on the spot." By "someone" he meant himself. The baronet was Chairman of a Committee charged with the task of repatriating certain classes of refugees. The refugees having no wish to be repatriated and the Committee boasting not a single business man in its composition, matters were not progressing as rapidly--so said the type-written report in the Chairman's hands--as could be hoped.