Vi Vassity and I will be debarred from that function, because we're both married women. Yes! I am married, too! But not to Mr. Reginald Brace. For when he persisted, "Why are you so sure you could never care?" I said frankly, "I hate to hurt you. But--Reginald, I don't like the way your hair grows." He looked at me in utter bewilderment through the darkness-made-visible of those Welsh lamps. He said: "But a man can't help the way his hair grows!" "No. And a woman can't help the way she feels about it," I told him sadly but resolutely. He saw at last that I meant I wasn't going to take him. He went--after saying all those things about remembering me as the sweetest girl he'd ever met, and if ever I wanted a friend, et cetera--all the pathetic, well-meant, useless things that I suppose a rejected man finds some comfort in. He went back to a whirl of business at his bank, and he has stayed there ever since, "carrying on" his usual everyday job (the only sort of "carrying on" he knows, as Vi Vassity would say). In his way he is "on active service" too; doing his duty by his country. There is something the matter with his heart--besides his crossed-in-love affair, I mean--something that prevents him from enlisting. Very hard lines on him, to be quite young and otherwise fit, but doomed to remain a civilian. Of course there have to be some people as civilians still. We couldn't get on without any civilians at all, could we? My lover joined as a trooper the day before war was officially declared. And he came over to Miss Million's house in Wales to tell us of his plans the morning after Mr. Brace had gone off to town. He--the other man--was still in the laurel-green chauffeur's kit that he was so soon going to change for his Majesty's drab-coloured but glorious livery. And I was in my maid's black, with cap and apron, when I opened the door to him. "Where's your mistress? In the drawing-room? Then come into the library, child," said the Honourable Jim Burke, "for it's you I've come to call upon." "I've only a minute to spare you," I said forbiddingly, as I showed him into the square, rather mouldy-smelling library, with its wall of unread books and its family-portraits of dead and gone Price-Vaughans. "And besides, I don't think a chauffeur ought to come to the front door and----" "I shall not be a chauffeur a minute longer than it takes me to get out of this dashed kit," said the Honourable Jim. Then he told me about his enlisting for active service. "It won't be much time I shall have before that regiment gets its orders," he said. "Time enough, though----" He paused and looked hard at me. So hard that I felt myself colouring, and turned away. He took a step after me. I felt him give a little pull at my apron-strings to make me look round. "Time enough to get married, darling of my heart," said Jim Burke, laughing softly.