He hung up the receiver, and sat back in his chair, with a frown. Then suddenly a thought struck him, and he pulled the letters he had received that morning out of his pocket. He extracted one in Nancy Smallwood's sprawling handwriting, and glanced through it again to make sure. "Dine 8 o'clock--and go on to Mainwarings' dance afterwards. . . . Do come, if you can. . . ." Vane, placing it on the table in front of him, bowed to it profoundly. "We might," he remarked to Binks, "almost have it framed." And Binks' quivering tail assented, with a series of thumps against his basket. "I hope you won't find your dinner partner too dreadful." Nancy Smallwood was shooting little bird-like glances round the room as she greeted Vane that evening. "She has a mission . . . or two. Keeps soldiers from drinking too much and getting into bad hands. Personally, anything--_anything_ would be better than getting into hers." "I seem," murmured Vane, "to have fallen on my feet. She isn't that gargantuan woman in purple, is she?" "My dear boy! That's George's mother. You know my husband. No, there she is--the wizened up one in black. . . . And she's going on to the Mainwarings' too--so you'll have to dance with her." At any other time Vane might have extracted some humour from his neighbour, but to-night, in the mood he was, she seemed typical of all that was utterly futile. She jarred his nerves till it was all he could do to reply politely to her ceaseless "We are doing this, and we decided that." To her the war had given an opportunity for self-expression which she had hitherto been denied. Dreadful as she undoubtedly thought it with one side of her nature, with another it made her almost happy. It had enabled her to force herself into the scheme of things; from being a nonentity, she had made herself a person with a mission. . . . True, the doings and the decisions on which she harped continually were for the benefit of the men he had led. But to this woman it was not the men that counted most. They had to fit into the decisions; not the decisions into them. . . . They were inexorable, even as the laws of the Medes and Persians. And who was this wretched woman, to lay down the law? What did she know; what did she understand? "And so we decided that we must really stop it. People were beginning to complain; and we had one or two--er--regrettable scandals." With a start Vane woke up from his reverie and realised he had no idea what she was talking about. "Indeed," he murmured. "Have a salted almond?" "Don't you think we were right, Captain Vane?" she pursued inexorably. "The men are exposed to so many temptations that the least we can do is to remove those we can." "But are they exposed to any more now than they were before?" he remarked wearily. "Why not let 'em alone, dear lady, let 'em alone? They deserve it." At length the ladies rose, and with a sigh of relief Vane sat down next a lawyer whom he knew well.