"Please understand," I said, "that I accept no responsibility. The child goes to and from the hospital _when_ she likes, _how_ she likes. I know nothing of the people with whom she associates there; and, if you like the idea of her coming in at all hours from theatres and dances, I suppose it's all right. But I can't stop her," I said; "I feel it my duty to tell you I can't stop her." Brackenbury made some foolish rejoinder about Phyllida's head being screwed on tight or her heart being in the right place. (In that family they _express_ themselves so uncouthly. Goodness me, one need not be a blue-stocking to realize that English _has_ a certain dignity.) She was only doing what every other girl did, he said... I'm as democratic as any one, but I wondered what our _father_ would have said to the doctrine that his daughter might do a thing simply because everybody else was doing it... You know this Colonel Butler, perhaps? (It's only brevet-rank; if he stays on in the army, he reverts to full lieutenant only.) I'll confess at once that I liked him. When he was convalescent, Phyllida brought him to luncheon one day in Mount Street, and I thought him a decent, manly young fellow. I understand he comes from the west of England; and that, perhaps, accounts for the accent which I thought I detected; or, of course, he may simply have been not altogether at ease. (When I commented on it afterwards to Phyllida, she insisted that he was very badly shaken by his wound and the three operations... I think that was the first time I suspected anything; she championed him so very warmly.) I liked him--frankly. Some one quite early in the war said something about "temporary officers" and "temporary gentlemen"--it was very naughty, but so true!--; I said to my boy Will, when Colonel Butler was gone: "If they were all like _him_, the army might be proud of them." "All I've met _are_ like him," said Phyllida, "only of course not so much so." I was struggling to find a meaning--Phyllida expresses herself almost as carelessly as her poor mother, but with hardly her mother's excuse--, when she began to pour out a catalogue of his virtues: he had won a Military Cross and a Distinguished Service Order with a bar, he was the youngest colonel in the army, I don't know what else. "Who are his people?," I asked. A name like Butler is so very misleading; it may be all right--or it may not. "I _really_ don't know," said Phyllida, "and, what's more, I don't care..."