She had had so many of these clean straight young sheiks that even poor Mr. Winterbourne got mixed up, and when he used to write dramatic letters beginning: “Sir, you have robbed me of my wife’s affection like a low hound—be it said in no unChristian spirit”—the letters were always getting addressed to the penultimate or ante-penultimate sheik, instead of the straight clean one of the moment. However, rendered serious by the exhortations of the war press and still more by the ever ripening maturity of her charms, Mrs. Winterbourne made an instinctive and firm clutch at Sam Browne—so successfully that she clutched the poor devil for the remainder of his abbreviated life. (She did the abbreviating.) Sam Browne, of course, was almost too good to be true. If I hadn’t seen him myself I should never have believed in him. He was an animated—and not so very animated—stereotype. His knowledge of life was rudimentary to the point of being quadruped, and intelligence had been bestowed upon him with rigid parsimony. An adult Boy Scout, a Public School fag in shining armour—the armour of obtuseness. He met every situation in life with a formula, and no situation in life ever reached him except in the shape imposed upon it by the appropriate and pre-determined formula. So, though he wasn’t very successful at anything, he got along all right, sliding almost decorously down grooves which had nothing ringing about them. Unless urged, he never mentioned his wound, his decoration, or the fact that he had “rolled up” on August 4th. The modest well-bred, et cetera, English gentleman. The formula for the death of a married mistress’s son was stern heroism, and gentle consolation to the wounded mother heart. Mrs. Winterbourne played up at first—it was the sort of thing that the sheik always did with his passionate but tender love. But the effect of George’s death on her temperament was, strangely enough, almost wholly erotic. The war did that to lots of women. All the dying and wounds and mud and bloodiness—at a safe distance—gave them a great kick, and excited them to an almost unbearable pitch of amorousness. Of course, in that eternity of 1914-18 they must have come to feel that men alone were mortal, and they immortals; wherefore they tried to behave like houris with all available sheiks—hence the lure of “war work” with its unbounded opportunities. And then there was the deep primitive physiological instinct—men to kill and be killed; women to produce more men to continue the process. (This, however, was often frustrated by the march of Science, viz., anticonceptives; for which, much thanks.)