She put her hand indifferently on my arm. She was nearly as tall as I, and I noticed as we passed the windows that, that night at any rate, her red-gold plait had been taken up and was closely swathed about her nape. Of course young Kingsley or young somebody else had said something or done something, or hadn't said or done anything, or if he had had done it at the wrong moment or in the wrong way or had otherwise conjured up the shade of tragedy. Therefore, as there are occasions when tact may take the form of talking about one's self, I talked to Jennie about myself as we skirted the garden. "Do you know, something rather exciting happened to me this morning," I remarked. She showed no great interest, but asked me what it was. "It mayn't sound much to you, but it interests me. I think I've started a new book." "I wish I'd something to do," was the extent of her congratulation. "What would you like to do?" "Oh, anything. I shouldn't care what it was. Anything's better than this." "Than this jolly party?" "Yes. Or else I wish I'd been born a man. They get all the chances." I reflected that one man, somewhere in the world, would have a very enviable chance, but kept my thought to myself. "Been having a row with somebody?" I asked. "No," she answered, I have no doubt entirely untruthfully. "I'm just fed up. I wish I could have nursed in the war or something, but I was too young. Or I wish I could write like you. But if I told father I wanted to earn my own living he wouldn't hear of it, and mother's one idea is to dress me up and show me off and marry me to somebody. They don't know how sick I am of it." I glanced at her as we passed the lighted windows again. That soft red sill of her lower lip was level, and just a shade short for the upper member of her mouth's sweet portal, so that the pearls within were negligently guarded. Temper and discontent were in her pebble-grey eyes. She gave her head an impatient toss, as if to shake off the thought of the boisterous young cadets and crammer's-pups within. In a day she seemed to have outgrown them, to have lengthened her mind as she lengthened her frocks--if young women do lengthen their frocks nowadays. She wanted to nurse, to write, to be a student or some personage's secretary, to say to the dingy world, "Here I am--use me and don't spare me," in the very moment when I and such as I, disillusioned and worn, were sighing "Enough--release me--or if that may not be, give me but once more, once more that first dawning joy!" "I don't want to get married," she sulked. "Ever. Mother may laugh, but I won't. It would have been different in the war. I love all those darling boys who were killed. But these schoolboys are all the same.... You don't want a secretary for your new book, do you?"