I bought what costumes I needed and took them with me. On our arrival in New York the rehearsals began. While we were at work, the author got the idea of adding to the play a scene in which Dr. Quack hypnotised a young widow. Hypnotism at that moment was very much to the fore in New York. To give the scene its full effect he needed very sweet music and indeterminate illumination. We asked the electrician of the theatre to put green lamps along the footlights and the orchestra leader to play a subdued air. The great question next was to decide what costume I was to wear. I was unable to buy a new one. I had spent all the money advanced me for my costumes and, not knowing what else to do, I undertook to run over my wardrobe in the hope of finding something that would be fit to wear. In vain. I could not find a thing. All at once, however, I noticed at the bottom of one of my trunks a small casket, a very small casket, which I opened. Out of it I drew a light silk material, comparable to a spider’s web. It was a skirt, very full and very broad at the bottom. I let the skirt dangle in my fingers, and before this little heap of fragile texture I lingered in reverie for some time. The past, a past very near and yet already far away, was summoned up before me. It had happened in London some months before. A friend had asked me to dine with several officers who were being wined and dined just before leaving for India, where they were under orders to rejoin their regiment. The officers were in handsome uniforms, the women in low dresses, and they were pretty, as only English women are. At table I was seated between two of the youngest officers. They had very long necks and wore extremely high collars. At first I felt myself greatly overawed in the presence of people so imposing as my neighbours. They looked snobbish and uncommunicative. Presently I discovered that they were much more timid than I, and that we should never be better acquainted unless one or the other of us resolved to overcome his own nervousness and, at the same time, that of his companions. But my young officers were afraid only in the presence of women. When I told them I hoped they might never be engaged in a war, and especially that they might never have to do any killing, one of them answered me very simply: “I fancy I can serve as a target as well as any other man, and certainly the people who draw on me will understand that war is on.” They were essentially and purely English. Nothing could unsettle them, provoke them or change them in the least. At our table they seemed timid. They were nevertheless men of the kind who go into the presence of death just as one encounters a friend in the street. At this period I did not understand the English as I have subsequently come to know them. I left the table without remembering to ask the names of my neighbours, and when I thought about the matter it was too late.