"As long as we leave Revue alone, I don't much mind what else we do," Kitty said. "Revue is England's hope, I believe. Because it's the only art in which all the forms of expression come in--talking, music, singing, dancing, gesture--standing on your head if nothing else will express you at the moment.... I believe Revue is going to be tremendous. Look how its stupidities and vulgarities have been dropping away from it lately, this last year has made a new thing of it altogether; it's beginning to try to show the whole of life as lived.... Oh, we must leave Revue alone.... I sometimes think it's so much the coming thing that I can't be happy till I've chucked my job and gone into it, as one of a chorus. I should feel I was truly serving my country then; it would be a real thing, instead of this fantastic lunacy I'm involved in now...." At times Kitty forgot she was talking to the Minister who had created the fantastic lunacy. "You can't leave the Ministry," said the Minister curtly. "You can't be spared." Kitty was annoyed with him for suddenly being serious and literal and even cross, and was just going to tell him she should jolly well leave the Ministry whenever she liked, when some quality in his abrupt gravity caught the words from her lips. "We haven't got industrial conscription to that extent yet," she merely said, weakly. It was all he didn't say to her in the moment's pause that followed which was revealing; all that seemed to be forced back behind his guarded lips. What he did say, presently, was "No, more's the pity. It'll come, no doubt." And, talking of industrial conscription, they walked back. What stayed with Kitty was the odd, startled, doubtful look he had given her in that moment's pause; almost as if he were afraid of something. 6 Kitty took at this time to sleeping badly; even worse, that is to say, than usual. In common with many others, she always did so when she was particularly interested in anyone. She read late, then lay and stared into the dark, her thoughts turning and twisting in her brain, till, for the sake of peace, she turned on the light again and read something; something cold, soothing, remote from life as now lived, like Aristophanes, Racine, or Bernard Shaw. Attaining by these means to a more detached philosophy, she would drift at last from the lit stage where life chattered and gesticulated, and creep behind the wings, and so find sleep, so little before it was time to wake that she began the day with a jaded feeling of having been up all night.