Eleanor Warrender a little later closes their eyes in the last sleep. She has watched beside hundreds of men like that as they have gone out into the Great Beyond. And just now she walks into the Ladies’ Empire Club as calmly as if she had but come from a shopping tour in Oxford Street. Ah, well, but one can suffer just so much, as on a musical instrument you may strike the highest key and you may strike it again and again until it flats a little on the ear because you have become so accustomed to it. But it is the limit. It is the highest key. There is nothing more beyond, at least. And that is what you feel ultimately about these women who have come through the experience that leads to the decoration. It is one in the most constant danger who arrives at length at the most constant calm. [Illustration: THE VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY Of the old French aristocracy, one of the most conspicuous examples that the war affords of noblesse oblige in the Red Cross Service. ] “I don’t know really why it should be called bravery,” says Eleanor Warrender’s quiet voice. “You see, a bomb has never dropped on me, so I have no actual personal experience of what it would be like. Now in that old convent in Flanders turned into a hospital, Sister Gertrude at the third cot from where I stood had a leg blown off, and Sister Felice had lost an arm, and I think it was very brave of them to go right on nursing in the danger zone afterward. But I—as I have said—no bomb has ever hit me. And having no experience of what the sensation would be like, it isn’t particularly brave of me to go about my business without special attention to a danger of which I have no experience of pain to remember. As for death,” and Eleanor Warrender looked out in Grosvenor Street into the yellow grey London fog, “as for death, it is, after all, only an episode. And what does it matter whether one is here or there?”