She found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf. . . . A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin. . . . He was saying to her: "If, ma'am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd. . . ." And she had exclaimed: "You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toe-nails. . . . And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes. . . ." "I told him," her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, "that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes. . . . Imperial troops _will_ use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer. . . ." "It sounds," she said with a little shudder, "as if you were all schoolboys playing a game. . . . And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things. . . ." Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious that the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt, purchased that afternoon at the Ordnance, and therefore brand-new, did not match the abdominal part of the belt that he had had for nearly ten years--a splendid bit of leather, that!--answered nevertheless stoutly: "Madam! If the brains of an army aren't, the life of an army _is_ . . . in its feet. . . . And nowadays, the medical officers say, in its teeth. . . . Your husband, ma'am, is an admirable officer. . . . He says that no draft he turns out shall. . . ." She said: "He spent three hours in . . . You say, foot and kit inspection. . . ." Second-Lieutenant Cowley said: "Of course he had other officers to help him with the kit . . . but he looked at every foot himself. . . ." She said: "That took him from two till five. . . . Then he had tea, I suppose. . . . And went to . . . What is it? . . . The papers of the draft. . . ." Second-Lieutenant Cowley said, muffledly through his moustache: "If the captain is a little remiss in writing letters . . . I _have_ heard. . . . You might, madam . . . I'm a married man myself . . . with a daughter. . . . And the army is not very good at writing letters. . . . You might say, in that respect, that thank God we have got a navy, ma'am. . . ." She let him stagger on for a sentence or two, imagining that, in his confusion, she might come upon traces of Miss Wannop in Rouen. Then she said handsomely: