Twenty minutes later, in the large tea-rooms of a fashionable hotel just off the Strand, there was a murmur of interest as a flying-officer, quizzically dejected of countenance, entered with a young lady, who glanced shyly about, and whose fingers held his, timidly but confidingly. He secured a table, and ordered tea from a pleasant waitress. This accomplished, he said something to his companion, who was sitting bolt-upright, keeping a steady gaze on her hands crossed on her lap. Smiling a little, she slowly raised her face and looked into his. A young Canadian subaltern, seated at a table with a woman whose overpowdered, meaningless beauty was only too eloquent, stopped in some remark he was making. Something in the French girl's face had sent his mind, smitten with loneliness, speeding across the Atlantic to a home whence a mother and a sister had sent the finest thing they had across the seas. Near them, two girls, fresh of face, tittered and posed, challenging the eyes of every man who entered, with a brazen immodesty strangely at variance with their appearance of decent breeding. At a farther table a young woman, with a beauty that was marred by too hard a mouth, sat with her mother and listened to that woman's urging that she should marry a wealthy Jew who had asked for her hand. Was it not her duty to herself and to her mother? Besides, even if that young fellow did come back uncrippled from the trenches--which was unlikely--he would have to begin all over again. Alone, a good-looking artist, discharged from the army with wounds, sat with an insouciant, mocking eye, searching for types and adventure. Around him women of all ages, some of them with men, smoked, while their chatter mixed discordantly with the orchestra playing some negroid ragtime piece, and with the sound of rattling tea-cups. "Your Majesty," said the miller's niece, relapsing into her former style of address, "there is so much I cannot understand." "Such as what, youngster?" "These ladies here. Some are so pretty and so nice. Others are pretty and----" Again she shrugged her shoulders as only a French woman can. "I am so young, it is true--but see that lady there." "With the young Canadian--yes?" "Somehow, monsieur, she frightens me. I did not know that women ever looked that way--like Louis when he catches a mouse." "The simile is very apt, Pippa." "But then"--her brows puckered with a first endeavor to harness language to her psychology--"you can see that nice girl there, so fair and pink." "I prefer them dark," said he seriously; "but what of her?" The expounder of philosophy breathed deeply, but stuck to her task. "I think," she said, "that the fair girl is nice, but this one is ..." (shrug) ... "Then why, monsieur, does the nice one try to look just like the other?--_Regardez-moi ça_--see her now." He poured out the tea, which had just arrived. "Shall I tell you a story?" he asked.