Thinking it over after you left, I have decided to send you the enclosed for the motor ambulance fund. I never like refusing you, but I should like you to remember that business is one thing and charity another. Yours ever, STEPHEN RINGSMITH. Within the letter was a cheque for £2,500. “Not so bad,” muttered Peter, “but he’s got the Mauve and the Daubigny for nothing, and there were no expenses on this deal.” V. “BOBBY” When War came, Julian Froelich, known to his friends as “Bobby,” found himself in a situation which in his wildest dreams he had never contemplated. This is not surprising, considering that his mental activities had been exclusively limited to procuring himself what he called “a good time.” In that brief phrase could be summed up Bobby’s entire philosophy, and when he suddenly had to face a state of things which from one moment to another swept away the groundwork upon which his life reposed, it is no wonder that he felt himself “knocked out.” With incredible velocity his friends were caught up and whirled in every direction like cockle-shells in a hurricane. Their haunts knew them no more, and before he could realize his personal concern with catastrophic events Bobby became a disconsolate wanderer in search of the flotsam and jetsam which were all that remained of his demolished world. For a time Bobby was unnerved. At first singly, then by twos, by threes, by dozens, those with whom his life had been spent--frequenters of the restaurant, the racecourse, the tavern, and the theatre--followed one another in a headlong race to the unknown. His brain reeled under successive shocks. He was awestruck by the appalling suddenness of death and destruction. Daring no inquiry, avoiding those whose faces he dreaded to read, he forsook his former luxurious resorts and almost slunk into the corners of obscure eating-places and cafés in Soho. Bobby will not easily forget those first few weeks of the War. Then gradually he pulled himself together, and unable to escape the influence by which he was surrounded, he tried to take his little part in the common effort. But his training was against him. At forty-five years of age it is no easy task for any man to put the past behind him and begin afresh; for Bobby to have done so would have needed a strength of will and character which he never at any time in his life possessed. He did succeed in getting various jobs, but one after another he threw them up. In each case he found a suitable excuse for himself and an explanation for his friends; there was always some insuperable reason why he was “obliged to chuck it,” and he finally resigned himself to a form of existence which differed from his former one, but only in degree.