“The Germans made the war, and the war took me away from Evelyn, just after our marriage.... Imagine the situation. A kid of a girl, wanting to be merry and bright, eager for the fun of life and all that, left alone in a big old house in the country, or when she got fed up with that, in a big gloomy house in town. She got fed up with both pretty quick. I used to get letters from her--every day for a while--and she used to say in every one of them, ‘I’m fed up like Billy-O.’ That was her way of putting it, don’t you know, and I got scared. But what could I do--out there--except write and tell her to try and get busy with something? Well, she got busy all right!” Harding laughed again in his woful way, which was not good to hear. Then he became angry and passionate, and told me it was all the fault of “those damned women.” I asked him what “damned women,” and he launched into a wild denunciation of a certain set of women--most of the names he mentioned were familiar to me from full-length portraits in the _Sketch_ and _Tatler_--who had spent the years of war in organising fancy bazaars, charity matinées, private theatricals for Red Cross funds--“and all that,” as Harding remarked in his familiar phrase. He said they were rotten all through, utterly immoral, perfectly callous of all the death and tragedy about them, except in a false, hysterical way at times. “They were ghouls,” he said. Many of them had married twice, three times, even more than that, before the boys who were killed were cold in their graves. Yet those were the best, with a certain respect for convention. Others had just let themselves go. They had played the devil with any fellow who came within their circle of enticement, if he had a bit of money, or could dance well, or oiled his hair in the right way. “They corrupted English society,” said Harding, “while they smiled, and danced, and dressed in fancy clothes, and posed for their photos in the papers. It was they who corrupted Evelyn, when the poor kid was fighting up against her loneliness, and very hipped, and all that.” “Who was the man?” I asked, and Harding hesitated before he told me. It was with frightful irony that he answered. “The usual man in most of these cases. The man who is always one’s best pal. Damn him!” Harding seemed to repent of that curse, at least his next words were strangely inconsistent. “Mind you, I don’t blame him, either. It was I who sent him to Evelyn. He was in the Dragoons with me, and when he went home on leave I said, ‘Go and cheer up my little wife, old man. Take her to a theatre or two, and all that. She’s devilish lonely.’ Needless to say, he fell in love with her. I might have known it. As for Evelyn, she was immensely taken with young Dick. He was a bit of a humourist and made her laugh. Laughter was a devilish good thing in war-time. That was where Dick had his pull. I might have known _that_! I was a chuckle-headed idiot.”