London, dusty and drowsy on this Autumn evening, seemed to yawn and smile and had, Alix thought, a welcoming air. It was a kind city. She even saw beauty in it, and commented on the Royal Hospital as they drove through Chelsea. “How well it goes in the thick, soft air—that period, that colour.” She had never liked London so much, although she came to it with an unwillingness so much greater than the unwillingness of last year, and it seemed to her, leaning back in the taxi beside Giles, her kitten against her cheek, that the dropped aitches, the little green-grocer’s shops, the strolling lovers, and the river gliding silvery-grey behind its trees, all went together in the impression of ease and kindliness. In Aunt Bella’s flat all the windows were widely opened to the freshness, and Aunt Bella received not only her, but Blaise, quite as a matter of course. This matter-of-courseness, Alix had begun to feel, was a distinctive English trait. Once they knew you, they accepted you; you and your kittens. They had no surmises about you. You were simply there. Was it, Alix wondered, while she changed her dress in her little pink room—Blaise cautiously reconnoitring from piece to piece of the furniture—was it that Aunt Bella saw her benevolently as an _œuvre de guerre_, or sentimentally as a legacy from the dead nephew? As she reflected on her own presence, so intimately among them, Alix felt that if Maman’s motives were mysterious to her from their complexity, Aunt Bella’s would be mysterious from their simplicity. And it was all like London again; like the cosy little shops with the carrots and cabbages heaped before their windows, the muffling air and unadventurous river. There was peace in such simplicity, peace in being among people who had nothing to hide and who would hardly be able to imagine that you might have. She felt at dinner that Aunt Bella looked at her, in her altered way of dressing, a little as Miss Grace and Jennifer had looked when Lady Mary talked to her about Henri de Mouveray. Aunt Bella, no doubt, found the little dress that Maman had so cleverly contrived out of two Empire scarves, curious rather than interesting. Charming in colour, dull blue shot with silver, it was a marvel of convenience as well as so pretty. One turn and it fell into place, leaving arms and shoulders bare, knotting low about the hips and falling in long silvery fringes to the ankle. Seen in Aunt Bella’s flat it had undoubtedly a very Parisian air, and perhaps Aunt Bella felt it too Parisian, for she began to question Alix about France’s foreign policy with some severity. Alix gathered that in Aunt Bella’s eyes her country was behaving badly. “But we want the Germans to suffer,” she said. “If they are not made to suffer sufficiently, they will make us suffer again and perhaps destroy us.” “But that is being revengeful, my dear child. And so short-sighted, too. You don’t change people’s hearts by making them suffer. You harm yourself as well as them.”