For nearly a fortnight after the raid the Goslings lay snug in their little house in Wisteria Grove, for they, in company with the majority of English people at this time, had not yet fully appreciated the fact that women were almost immune from infection. In all, not more than eight per cent of the whole female population was attacked, and of this proportion the mortality was almost exclusively among women over fifty years of age. When the first faint rumours of the plague had come to Europe, this curious, almost unprecedented, immunity of women had been given considerable prominence. It had made good copy, theories on the subject had appeared, and the point had aroused more interest than that of the mortality among males--infectious diseases were commonplace enough; this new phase had a certain novelty and piquancy. But the threat of European infection had overwhelmed the interest in the odd predilection of the unknown bacterium, and the more vital question had thrown this peculiarity into the background. Thus the Goslings and most other women feared attack no less than their husbands, brothers and sons, and found justification for their fears in the undoubted fact that women had died of the plague. The Goslings had always jogged along amiably enough; their home life would have passed muster as a tolerably happy one. The head of the family was out of the house from 8.15 a.m. to 7.15 p.m. five days of the week, and it was only occasionally in the evening of some long wet Sunday that there was any open bickering. Now, confinement in that little house, aggravated by fear and by the absence of any interest or diversion coming from outside, showed the family to one another in new aspects. Before two days had passed the air was tense with the suppressed irritation of these four people, held together by scarcely any tie other than that of a conventional affection. By the third day the air was so heavily charged that some explosion was inevitable. It came early in the morning. Gosling had run out of tobacco, and he thought in the circumstances that it would be wiser to send Blanche or Millie than to go himself. So, with an air of exaggerated carelessness, he said: "Look here, Millie, my gel, I wish you'd just run out and see if you can get me any terbaccer." "Not me," replied Millie, with decision. "And why not?" asked Gosling. Millie shrugged her shoulders, and called her sister, who was in the passage. "I say, B., father wants us to go out shopping for him. Are you on?" Blanche, duster in hand, appeared at the doorway. "Why doesn't he go himself?" she asked. "Because," replied her father, getting very red, and speaking with elaborate care, "men's subject to the infection and women is not." "That's all my eye," returned Millie. "Lots of women have got it." "It's well known," said Gosling, still keeping himself in hand, "a matter of common knowledge, that women is comparatively immune."