It seemed an age to Miss Searson before William the Incredible girded his courage to the point of ordering a pint of bitter. She drew it in stately silence, handed it across the counter and accepted threepence with superb hauteur. He drank a little. It was no mean brew; and he felt so much a man for the experience that he was able to ask Miss Searson what she thought of the news. "News," said Miss Searson loftily. "News?" "War with Germany." "Oh, that!" A Juno-like toss of Miss Searson's coiffure. But there she stopped. War with Germany was none of her business, nor was it going to be her business to be forced into conversation with a character whose standing was so doubtful as the former barman. Miss Searson was not a believer in finesse. Her methods had a brutal simplicity which made them tremendously effective. However, this evening they were less effective than usual. The world itself was tottering, and a deep, deep chord in the amazing Bill Hollis was responsive to the cataclysm. This evening he was not himself, he was more than himself; his appearance in the Private Bar was proof of it. Miss Searson was but a woman, a human female. She meant nothing, she meant less than nothing in this hour of destiny. "Yes, that!" He filled in the pause, after waiting in vain for her to do so. "War with Germany. Do you realize it?" His voice was full of emotion. But Miss Searson did not intend to be drawn into a discussion of anything so fanciful as war with Germany. She was practical. A censorious mouth shut like a trap. She regarded Bill with the eye of a codfish. "D'you realize what it means?" By an adroit turn of the head towards the farther beer-engine she gave William Hollis the full benefit of a pile of stately back hair. And then she said slowly, as if she were trying to bite off the head of each blunt syllable, "Do you realize that the Mester sometimes looks in about this time of a Thursday?" XIV A normal Bill Hollis would not have been slow to analyze this speech and to find a lurking insult. But he was not a normal Bill Hollis this evening; it was the last place he was likely to be in if he had been. Therefore he shook his head gently at Miss Searson without submitting her to any more destructive form of criticism. What a fool the woman was, what a common fool not to understand that in the presence of a war with Germany nothing else could possibly matter. "I don't think I'd stop here--if I was you." Yes, there was a bluntness about Miss Searson which at ordinary times had a unique power of "getting there." But Bill merely smiled at her now. The chrysanthemum-topped fathead! Suddenly he reached the limit of his endurance; he expressed a boundless contempt for her and all her tribe by recourse to a spittoon. How _could_ Melia ever have married him ... Melia Munt who might have married an architect!...