‘Here is Jane,’ said Lady Pinkerton.

Jane’s dark hair fell in damp waves over her hot, square, white forehead; her blue cotton dress was crumpled and limp.  How neat, how cool, was this Hobart!  Could a man have a Gibson face like that, like a young man on the cover of an illustrated magazine, and not be a ninny?  Did he take the Pinkerton press seriously, or did he laugh?  Both, probably, like most journalists.  He wouldn’t laugh to Lord Pinkerton, or to Lady Pinkerton, or to Clare.  But he might laugh to Jane, when she showed him he might.  Jane, eating jam sandwiches, looking like a chubby school child, with her round face and wide eyes and bobbed hair and cotton frock, watched the beautiful young man with her solemn unwinking stare that disconcerted self-conscious people, while Lady Pinkerton talked to him about some recent fiction.

On Sunday, people came over to lunch, and they played tennis.  Clare and Hobart played together.  ‘Oh, well up, partner,’ Jane could hear him say, all the time.  Or else it was ‘Well tried.  Too bad.’  Clare’s happy eyes shone, brown and clear in her flushed face, like agates.  Rather a pretty thing, Clare, if dull.

The Franks were there, too.

‘Old Clare having a good time,’ said Mrs. Frank to Jane, during a set they weren’t playing in.  Her merry dark eyes snapped.  Instinctively, she usually said something to disparage the good time of other girls.  This time it was, ’That Hobart thinks he’s doing himself a good turn with pater, making up to Clare like that.  Oh, he’s a cunning fellow.  Isn’t he handsome, Jane?  I hate these handsome fellows, they always know it so well.  Nothing in his face really, if you come to look, is there?  I’d rather have old Frank’s, even if he does look like a half-starved bird.’

2

Jane was calmly rude to Hobart, showing him she despised his paper, and him for editing it.  She let him see it all, and he was imperturbably, courteously amused, and, in turn, showed that he despised her for belonging to the 1917 Club.

‘You don’t,’ he said, turning to Clare.

’Gracious, no.  I don’t belong to a club at all.  I go with mother to the Writers’ sometimes, though; that’s not bad fun.  Mother often speaks there, you know, and I go and hear.  Jolly good she is, too.  She read a ripping paper last week on the “Modern Heroine."’

Jane’s considering eyes weighed Hobart, whose courtesy was still impregnable.  How far was he the complete Potterite, identified with his absurd press?  Did he even appreciate Leila Yorke?  She would have liked to know.  But, it seemed, she was not to know from him.

3

The Armistice came.

Then the thing was to get to Paris somehow.  Jane had, unusually, not played her cards well.  She had neglected the prospect of peace, which, after all, must come.  When she had, in May, at last taken thought for the morrow, and applied at the Foreign Office for one of those secret jobs which could not be mentioned because they prepared the doers to play their parts after the great unmentionable event, she was too late.  The Foreign Office said they could not take over people from other government departments.