"On the little table, there," said the hostess. "In that box. Do you smoke, Mrs. Standish?" Mrs. Standish, it appeared, did not. "Throw me one, Eileen." She caught and lit it with an almost masculine neatness. "Yes," she continued, "she's perfectly sweet. Her husband is a senior Post-captain, and there isn't an atom of 'side' or snobbishness in her composition. She is just as sweet to that hopelessly dull and dreary Daubney woman as she is to--well, to charming and well-bred attractions like ourselves!" The speaker laughingly blew a cloud of smoke and turned to Betty. "In a sense, this war has done us good. You've never lived in a Dockyard Port, though. You don't know the insane snobberies and the ludicrous little castes that flourished in pre-war days." "I dare say you're right," said Eileen Cavendish. She moved idly about the room examining photographs and puffing her cigarette. "But even the War isn't going to make me fall on the neck of a woman I don't like. But I'm talking like a cat. It's not seeing Bill for so long...." Mrs. Clavering smiled. "No," she said, "I agree there are limits. But up here, what does it matter if a woman's husband is an Engineer or a Paymaster or a Commander or only an impecunious Lieutenant like mine--as long as she is nice? Yet if it weren't for people like Sybil Gascoigne we should all be clinging to our ridiculous little pre-war sets, and talking of branches and seniority till we died of loneliness and boredom with our aristocratic noses in the air.... As it is, I don't believe even Sybil Gascoigne could have done it if she hadn't been the Honourable Mrs. Gascoigne. That carried her over some pretty rough ground, childish though it sounds." "Bong Song!" interposed Mrs. Cavendish flippantly. "As----" She broke off abruptly. "There I go again! There's no doubt about it: I have got a liver ... I think I'll go home and write to Bill. That always does me good." That tea-party was the first of many similar informal gatherings of grass-widows in poky rooms and cottage parlours. They were quite young for the most part, and many were pretty. They drank each other's tea and talked about their husbands and the price of things, and occasionally of happenings in an incredibly remote past when one hunted and went to dances and bought pretty frocks. It was Etta Clavering who conducted Betty round the village shops on the morning after her arrival, where she was introduced to the small Scottish shopkeeper getting rich quick, and the unedifying revelation of naked greed cringing behind every tiny counter. Through Eileen Cavendish, moreover, she secured the goodwill of a washerwoman.