For the first time we gave Virginia’s bit of edging serious attention. What she had done with those directions it was impossible to say, but the result was certainly peculiar. “That will be a valuable piece of lace by the time it’s finished,” I said. “What are you going to do with it?” “I’m making it as a Christmas present for you,” she replied sweetly. “I think it may help to promote conversation if you display it at your social functions. I know you’re going to say how unselfish it is of me. I think, myself, I mellow as I age.” “Not at all,” I replied politely, and suggested that we should go for a walk, lest such concentrated thinking should be too much for her. “If you’d been a properly-minded hostess you would have proposed that long ago. I’ve been waiting anxiously for it, only there is Ursula absorbed in that outfit that no masculine infant anywhere would recognise——” “Oh, I’ve given up the knicker idea long ago,” interrupted Ursula. “I’ve turned them into chest-protectors for the old people in the infirmary. And now, as a war economy, I’m going to enlarge your vests (I neither ask for, nor expect, gratitude!). The laundry having shrunk them to waistbands, I shall add an upper and a lower storey.” “—and _you_ sit hour after hour reading MSS. What are they all about? What’s that one in your hand, for instance?” “This one,” holding up some sheets of violently-written paper that almost burst through the envelope, “is an anonymous letter from some irate lady who objects to something or someone appearing in our pages. I haven’t time to read it, but if you care to wade through it——” “Anonymous letters are so futile.” “Anything but,” I told her. “It is always a pleasant thing, at the end of the day, to feel that you have, even in a slight way, contributed to anyone’s happiness. And I’m sure the lady who dug her pen into that anonymous letter was very happy when she posted it. Glad am I, therefore, to be the unworthy instrument permitted to promote her joy!” Virginia merely snorted. “What’s the next MS. about?” “This is a very long poem on the War, and the writer explains that she has made all the lines run straight on in order to save paper, but doubtless I can find out where it rhymes. It begins ‘Hail, proud mother of nations who dwell in these sea-girt islands for centuries past and centuries yet to be——’” Virginia said she’d skip the rest, please, and wasn’t there a little light fiction anywhere in the chaos before me? “This is a story of a beautiful Russian princess who was doomed to live in a lonely castle, with no one but her aged and decrepit nurse, in the very centre of a pathless Siberian forest, hundreds of miles from everybody, until the spell should be broken——” “What spell?” inquired Ursula.