He would have snatched at it in the first week of the War, as he had said, but that Vera had made it hard for him. She was not making it easy now. The dull, dark moth's wings of her eyes hovered about him, fluttering with anxiety. When she heard that he was going to enlist she sent for Veronica. Veronica said, "You must let him go." "I can't let him go. And why should I? He'll do no good. He's over age. He's no more fit than I am." "You'll have to, sooner or later." "Later, then. Not one minute before I must. If they want him let them come and take him." "It won't hurt so much if you let him go, gently, now. He'll tear at you if you keep him." "He has torn at me. He tears at me every day. I don't mind his tearing. I mind his going--going and getting killed, wounded, paralysed, broken to pieces." "You'll mind his hating you. You'll mind that awfully." "I shan't. He's hated me before. He went away and left me once. But he came back. He can't really do without me." "You don't know how he'll hate you if you come between him and what he wants most." "_I_ used to be what he wanted most." "Well--it's his honour now." "That's what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy. They're men and they don't know. Dorothy's more a man than a woman. "But you're different. I thought you might help me to keep him--they say you've got some tremendous secret. And this is the way you go on!" "I wouldn't help you to keep him if I could. I wouldn't have kept Nicky for all the world. Aunt Frances wouldn't have kept him. She wants Michael to go." "She doesn't. If she says she does she lies. All the women are lying. Either they don't care--they're just _lumps_, with no hearts and no nerves in them--or they lie. "It's this rotten pose of patriotism. They get it from each other, like--like a skin disease. No wonder it makes Michael sick." "Men going out--thousands and thousands and thousands--to be cut about and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and sentimentalizing-- "Lying--lying--lying." "Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it sends them off happy?" "But we're not lying. It's the most real thing that ever happened to us. I'm glad Nicky's going. I shall be glad all my life." "It comes easy to you. You're a child. You've never grown up. You were a miserable little mummy when you were born. And now you look as if every drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens. If that's your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself. It seems to be all you've got." "If it wasn't for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it _would_ have been all I've got." Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really was. The child was not a child any more. She was a woman, astonishingly and dangerously mature. Veronica's sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in; they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with perfect accuracy.