Lady Dashwood was not to be drawn. "Talking of doing something," she said, to draw Mrs. Potten off the subject, and there was a touch of weariness in her voice: "I think a Frenchwoman can beat an Englishwoman any day at 'doing.' I am speaking now of the working classes. I have a French maid now who does twice the work that any English maid would do. I picked her up at the beginning of the war. Her husband was killed and she was stranded with two children. I've put the two children into a Catholic school in Kent and I have them in the holidays. Well, Louise makes practically all my things, makes her own clothes and the children's, and besides that we have made shirts and pyjamas till I could cut them out blindfolded. She's an object lesson to all maids." Lady Dashwood was successful, Mrs. Potten's attention was diverted, only unfortunately the word "maid" stimulated her to draw up an exhaustive inventory of all the servants she had ever had at Potten End, and she was doing this in her best Bradshaw style when Lady Dashwood exclaimed that she had a wire to send off and must go and do it. "I ought to be going too," said Mrs. Potten, her brain reeling for a moment at this sudden interruption to her train of thought. She rose with some indecision, leaving her bag on the floor. Then she stooped and picked up her bag and left her umbrella; and then at last securing both bag and umbrella, the two ladies made their way down the stairs and went back into St. Aldates. All the time that Mrs. Potten had been running through a list of the marriages, births, etc., of all her former servants, Lady Dashwood was contriving a telegram to Lady Belinda Scott. It was difficult to compose, partly because it had to be both elusive and yet firm, and partly because Mrs. Potten's voice kept on interrupting any flow of consecutive thought. When the two ladies had reached the post-office the wire was completed in Lady Dashwood's brain. "Good-bye," said Mrs. Potten, just outside the threshold of the door. "And if you see Bernard--I believe he means to go to tea at the Hardings--would you remind him that it is at Eliston's that he has to pick me up? There are attractions about!" added Mrs. Potten mysteriously, "and he may forget! Poor Bernard, such a good fellow in his way, but so wild, and he sometimes talks as if he were almost a conscientious objector, only he's too old for it to matter. I don't allow him to argue with me. I can't follow it--and don't want to. But he's a dear fellow." Lady Dashwood walked into the post-office. "Thank goodness, I can think now," she said to herself, as she went to a desk. The wire ran as follows:-- "Sorry. Saturday quite impossible. Writing." It was far from cordial, but cordial Lady Dashwood had no intention of being. She meant to do her duty and no more by Belinda. Duty would be hard enough. And when she wrote the letter, what should she say?