Peter, therefore, had always been a bit of an enigma to her. As a rule he fitted in with the scheme of things perfectly well, for he was a gentleman, he liked nice things, and he was splendidly keen on charity organisation and the reform of abuses on right lines. But now and again he said and did things which perturbed her. It was as if she had gradually become complete mistress of a house, and then had suddenly discovered a new room into which she peeped for a minute before it was lost to her again and the door shut. It was no Bluebeard's chamber into which she looked; it was much more that she had a suspicion that the room contained a live mistress who might come out one day and dispute her own title. She could tell how Peter would act nine times out of ten; she knew by instinct, a great deal better than he did, the conceptions that ruled his life; but now and again he would hesitate perplexedly as if at the thought of something that she did not understand, or act suddenly in response to an overwhelming flood of impulse whose spring was beyond her control or even her surmise. Women mother all their men because men are on the whole such big babies, but from a generation of babies is born occasionally the master. Women get so used to the rule that they forget the exception. When he comes, then, they are troubled. But this was not all Hilda's religion. For some mysterious reason this product of a highly civilised community had the elemental in her. Men and women both have got to eliminate all trace of sex before they can altogether escape that. In other words, because in her lay latent the power of birth, in which moment she would be cloistered alone in a dark and silent room with infinity, she clung unreasonably and all but unconsciously to certain superstitions which she shared with primitive savages and fetish-worshippers. All of which seems a far cry from the War Intercession Services at wealthy and fashionable St. John's, but it was nothing more or less than this which was causing her to kneel on a high hassock, elbows comfortably on the prayer-rail, and her face in her hands, on a certain Friday evening in the week after Peter's arrival in France, while the senior curate (after suitable pauses, during which her mind was uncontrollably busy with an infinite number of things, ranging from the doings of Peter in France to the increasing difficulty of obtaining silk stockings), intoned the excellent stately English of the Prayers set forth by Authority in Time of War.