"Of course you have explained everything, Mr. Cowley, and I am very much obliged. . . . Of course my husband would not have time to write very full letters. . . . He is not like the giddy young subalterns who run after . . ." He exclaimed in a great roar of laughter: "The captain run after skirts. . . . Why, I can number on my hands the times he's been out of my sight since he's had the battalion!" A deep wave of depression went over Sylvia. "Why," Lieutenant Cowley laughed on, "if we _had_ a laugh against him it was that he mothered the lot of us as if he was a hen sitting on addled eggs. . . . For it's only a rag-time army, as the saying is, when you've said the best for it that you can. . . . And look at the other commanding officers we've had before we had him. . . . There was Major Brooks. . . . Never up before noon, if then, and out of camp by two-thirty. Get your returns ready for signing before then or never get 'em signed. . . . And Colonel Potter . . . Bless my soul . . . 'e wouldn't sign any blessed papers at all. . . . He lived down here in this hotel, and we never saw him up at the camp at all. . . . But the captain. . . . We always say that . . . if 'e was a Chelsea adjutant getting off a draft of the Second Coldstreams. . . ." With her indolent and gracious beauty--Sylvia knew that she was displaying indolent and gracious beauty--Sylvia leaned over the tablecloth listening for items in the terrible indictment that, presently, she was going to bring against Tietjens. . . . For the morality of these matters is this: . . . If you have an incomparably beautiful woman on your hands you must occupy yourself solely with her. . . . Nature exacts that of you . . . until you are unfaithful to her with a snub-nosed girl with freckles: that, of course, being a reaction, is still in a way occupying yourself with your woman! . . . But to betray her with a battalion. . . . That is against decency, against Nature. . . . And for him, Christopher Tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here! . . . Tietjens, mooning down the room between tables, had more than his usually aloof air since he had just come out of a telephone box. He slipped, a weary mass, into the polished chair between her and the lieutenant. He said: "I've got the washing arranged for . . ." and Sylvia gave to herself a little hiss between the teeth, of vindictive pleasure! This was indeed betrayal to a battalion. He added: "I shall have to be up in camp before four-thirty to-morrow morning. . . ." Sylvia could not resist saying: "Isn't there a poem . . . _Ah me, the dawn, the dawn, it comes too soon_! . . . said of course by lovers in bed? . . . Who was the poet?" Cowley went visibly red to the roots of his hair and evidently beyond. Tietjens finished his speech to Cowley, who had remonstrated against his going up to the camp so early by saying that he had not been able to get hold of an officer to march the draft. He then said in his leisurely way: