The war was on then. It was 1915. “You see,” she used to appeal to the arbitrament before which, watching these pictures, she found herself, “you see, the war made everything so difficult, so impossible, so frightful, so confused, so blinding. Sturgiss had left the Bank to do war service in the Treasury. More than half the clerks had gone. We were understaffed and badly staffed at every turn. How could I give it up then? I don’t say I would have. I’m on my knees. I’ve thrown in my hand. I’m not pretending anything or anyway trying to delude myself. I don’t say I would have given it up and come home to make home life for the boy and for them all. I don’t say I would. I’m only saying how infinitely harder, how impossibly harder, the war conditions made it. There was the understaffing--that alone. There was the cry about releasing a man for the front--that alone. I was releasing half a dozen men. Field said I was. I knew I was. How could I go back and be one of the women sitting at home? That alone! How could I? And there was more than that. It wasn’t only the understaffing. It was Sturgiss going. I’d been absorbing the banking business for years. It was meat and drink to me. I’d had a bent for it ever since the Bagehot ‘Lombard Street’ days. I’d nourished my bent. I’d been encouraged to nourish my bent. The work was just a passion with me. Sturgiss went. I went practically into his place. I’d a position in banking that no woman had ever held, nor no banker ever imagined a woman ever holding, before. It was Sturgiss, a partner, I’d released for war service. It was Sturgiss’s, a partner’s, place I’d got. How could I give that up? How could I? How could I? If only the war hadn’t come. If only....” Strike on! It isn’t all going as it should with the boy at the tutor’s. But wasn’t it impossible to observe, at the time, that it wasn’t all going as it should? Of course (her thoughts would go) it was her fault; but was not the world, spiritual and material, in conspiracy against her, and against Huggo, and against her other darlings, to make easy her fault? Ah, that war, that war! Didn’t it unsettle everybody and everything? Naturally it unsettled the boy down at the tutor’s. Naturally one did not notice or foresee the trend of his unsettlement. Naturally it made plausible the excuses that he made.