He told me he didn't hunt, he'd never had any opportunity. There was quite a list of things he didn't do, but he was very simple and straightforward about them. Don't you dislike that _aggressive_ spirit which compels people to tell you how many they slept in one room and the night-schools they attended and so forth and so on? It makes me quite hot. I believe that's why they do it... There was nothing of that about Colonel Butler, though the army had made him a little _borné_. When I took him to see the stables, he shewed a certain sentimental interest in Phyllida's horses; but his only comment was: "I wish we were given beasts like that in the army." And it was the army in everything that he ate or read. Phyllida, as you know, has travelled more than most girls of her age; she wouldn't like to drop that altogether on marrying; but, if you said "Egypt" to Colonel Butler, it was simply a place where he'd been invalided the first time he was wounded at Gallipoli. The war seems to make some men curiously material... You understand I'm not criticizing him as a soldier; I'm sure he did excellent and useful work, but the war is only an _episode_ in our lives... At tea he was so silent that I felt it was all sinking in very deep. At the end he said: "Lady Ann, may I ask your advice? You are a woman of the world----" "Goodness me, no!," I said. "Thirty years ago I may have counted for something there; but now I live under my own little vine and fig-tree; I see no one; I'm out of touch; you'd find me very old-fashioned, I fear." "You've been very kind to me," he said, "and I want you to add to your kindness. I'm in love with Phyllida, as you know; and she--I think she quite likes me. Lord Brackenbury and every one here have been simply ripping. Please tell me what you think about it." "Do you mean, will she marry you?," I asked. "Yes," he said. "Oh, I should think it very likely," I told him; "I wondered whether you meant, would you make her _happy_?" "I should certainly hope to do that," he answered. "We all _hope_," I said... _My_ responsibility is confined to giving him a moment's pause for thought. Phyllida will tell you that I set him against her, poisoned his mind, I shouldn't wonder... It's most charitable to recognize that she really did not know what she was saying. I didn't talk about _him_ at all; I talked about Will, about my nephew Culroyd, their friends, their lives... Any deductions were of _his_ drawing; and, goodness me, one need not be branded a snob for seeing that they had been born and bred in different worlds. He seemed to think that _love_ would overcome everything. "If you're in _love_," he kept saying, "these things don't matter, do they?"