'Oh--respectable.' Alix laughed, again, shakily; it was such a funny word in this connection, and so like Violette. 'Well, I don't see it's funny,' said Evie. 'It's awfully important to be respectable, and I always am. I'll be good pals with any number of men, but when they begin to get like Basil Doye I won't have it unless they _mean_ something.' Thus Evie enunciated her code, and washed her hands and face and put on her dress and went downstairs. At the door she paused for a moment and looked back at Alix. 'I say, Al--I'm awfully sorry. I didn't mean to be a sneak, you know; I _wouldn't_ have, if I'd known.' 'Not a bit,' Alix absurdly and politely murmured. 'Well, do get a move on and come down. It's too cold for anything up here.... I say'--Evie paused awkwardly--' I say, kiddie, you didn't really _care_, did you?' Alix shook her head. 'Oh no.' Still her voice was small, polite, and attenuated. 'Well then,' said Evie cheerfully, 'no harm's done to any one. But still, it's not the style I like, a man that plays about first with one girl, then another.... I'm going down.' She went. 6 The cold made Alix shiver. She stiffly uncurled herself and got off the bed. She brushed her hair before the glass. Her face looked back at her, pointed and ghostly, in the gaslight and shadows. 'Cad,' whispered Alix, without emotion, to the pale image. 'Cad--and liar.' 'It's the war,' explained Alix presently, with detached, half-cynical analysis. 'I shouldn't have done that before the war. I suppose I might do anything now. Probably I shall. There seems no way out....' Alix had heard and read plenty of views on the psychological effects of war; some of them were interesting, some were true; many were true for some people and false for others; but she did not remember that even the most penetrating (or pessimistic) had laid enough emphasis on the mental and moral collapse that shook the foundations of life for some people. For her, anyhow, and for Paul; and they surely could not be the only ones. Observers seemed more apt to take the cases of those men and women who were improved; who were strengthened, steadied, made more unselfish and purposeful (that was the favourite word), with a finer sense of the issues and responsibilities of life; or of those young sportsmen at the front who kept their jollity, their sweetness, their equilibrium, through it all. Well, no doubt there were plenty of these. Look at Terry. Look at Dorothy and Margot at Wood End, in their new strenuousness and ardours. They weren't demoralised by horror, or eaten by jealousy like a canker. They could even minister to combatants without envying them.... There were such. There might be many. But Alix looked at them far off, herself a broken, nerve-wracked, frightened child, grabbing at other people's things to comfort herself, ashamed but outrageous. 'There seems no way out,' said Alix, and looked, as she changed her frock, down vistas of degradation.