Towards June the country bounded by the Four Roads woke to a certain liveliness. A big camp had sprung up on the outskirts of Hailsham, on the ridge above Horse Eye, and the excitement spread to Brownbread Street, Sunday Street, Bodle Street, Pont’s Green, Rushlake Green, and other Streets and Greens—and cottage gardens were a-swing with lines of khaki shirts, “soldiers’ washing,” taken in with high delight at an army’s big spending. The girls of the neighbourhood began to take new sweethearts with startling quickness. They came, these strangers from the North, leaving their girls behind them, and the girls of the South had lost their men to camps in France and Midland towns. No doubt some kept faith with the absent, but the spirit of the days mistrusted space as it mistrusted time, and the wisdom of love took no more account of happiness a hundred miles away than of happiness a hundred months ahead. There were wooings and matings and partings, all played out in the few spare hours of a soldier’s day, in the few spare miles of his roaming, under the thundery thick sky of a Sussex summer, when heat and drench play their alternate havoc with the earth. In those days Ivy Beatup lifted up her head. She had had a dull time since Kadwell and Viner and Pix went out to France. Thyrza’s cousin had turned out miserable prey—he had actually proposed himself as her husband to her father and mother, bringing forward most satisfactory evidence of a more than satisfactory income, derived from Honey’s Suitall Stores in Seaford. Thus the strain between Ivy and her family was increased, and her presence at home became a burden of reproach. They could not see why she refused to bestow her splendid healthy womanhood on this poor creature, why she would rather scrub floors and gut fowls than sit with folded hands in his parlour—that she had “taken him on” merely to kill time, and that it wasn’t her fault if he chose to treat her seriously and make a fool of himself. “You’ll die an old maid,” said her mother. “You’ll go to the bad,” said her father, and Ivy, who had no intention of doing either, felt angry and sore, and longed to justify herself by a new love-affair more gloriously conducted.