aggressive tortoise-shell rims.  She said, “I am short-sighted.  I am obliged to wear spectacles.  Why should I try to conceal the fact?  I will not have a pair of rimless ghosts haunting my face.  I will wear spectacles without shame.”  But the real truth was that the tortoise-shell rims were more becoming to her.  Mrs. Gustus was known to her husband’s family as Anonyma.  The origin of this habit was an old joke, and I have forgotten the point of it.

Cousin Gustus was second cousin once removed to Kew and Kew’s sister Jay, and had kindly brought them up from childhood.  He was now at the further end of the sixties, and embittered by many things:  an unsuitable marriage, the approach of the psalmist’s age-limit, incurably modern surroundings, an internal complaint, and a haunting wish to relieve the Government of the management of the War.  These drawbacks were to a certain extent linked, they accounted for each other.  The complaint hindered him from offering his services as Secretary of State; it made of him a slave, so he could not pretend to be a master.  He cherished his slavery, for it happened to be painless, and supplied him with a certain dignity which would otherwise have been difficult to secure.  During the summer the complaint hibernated, and ceased to interest either doctors or relations, which was naturally hard to bear.  To these trials you may add the disgraceful behaviour of his young cousin Jay, and admit that Cousin Gustus had every excuse for encouraging pessimism of the most pronounced type.

Jay’s brother Kew was twenty-five, and from this it follows that he had already drunk the surprising beverage of War.  His military history included a little splinter of hate in the left shoulder, followed by a depressing period almost entirely spent in the society of medical boards, three months of light duty consisting of weary instruction of fools in an East coast town, and now an interval of leave at the end of which the battalion to which he had lately been attached hoped to go to France.  In one way it was a pity he ever joined the Army, for khaki clashed badly with most of Mrs. Gustus’s colour theories.  But he had never noticed that:  his eye and his ear and his mind were all equally slow to appreciate clashings of any kind.  He was rather aloof from comparison and criticism, but not on principle.  He had no principles—­at least no original ones, just the ordinary stuffy old principles of decency and all that.  He never turned his eyes inward, as far as the passer-by could see; he lived a breezy life outside himself.  He never tried to make a fine Kew of himself; he never propounded riddles to his Creator, which is the way most of us make our reputations.