“She used to be a good girl,” sighed Cousin Gustus.  “So few girls are good.”

Cousin Gustus is an expert pessimist.  Vice, accidents, and terrible ends are his speciality.  All virtue is to him an exception, and by him is immediately forgotten.  In sudden deaths you cannot catch him out.  If you were tossed from the horns of a bull into the jaws of a crocodile, and died of pneumonia contracted during the flight, you would not surprise Cousin Gustus.  He is never at a loss for a precedent.  The only way you could really astonish him would be by living a blameless life without adventure, and dying of old age in your bed.

“There were warnings,” said Anonyma.  “Little disagreements with Gustus.”

“She wanted to bring vermin into the house,” mourned Cousin Gustus.

Kew suggested:  “White mice?”

“Not vermin unattended,” Anonyma explained.  “She wanted to adopt Brown Borough babies.  She had been working desultorily in the Brown Borough since War broke out.”

“That might explain the peculiar and un-Jay-like remark in her letter to you—­that she would settle in no home except the Perfect Home.  I hate things in capital letters.”

“Why didn’t she get married?” grumbled Cousin Gustus.  “She was engaged for nearly three weeks to young William Morgan, a most respectable young man.  So few young men—­”

“She wrote to me that she couldn’t keep up that engagement,” said Kew.  “Not even by looking upon it as War Work.  She called him a ’Surface young man,’ and that again seemed unlike her.  She usen’t to mind surfaceness.  The War seems to have turned her upside down.  But then, of course, the War has turned us all upside down, and in that position you generally get a rush of brains to the head.  We’re all feverish, that’s what’s the matter with us.  When I was in hospital I lived for three weeks on the top of a high temperature, laughing.  I want to laugh now....  It’s a damn funny world.”

“I once knew a man who died of apoplexy while swearing,” sniffed Cousin Gustus.

“You have been damned unlucky in your friends, Cousin Gustus,” said Kew.  He paused, and then added:  “Besides, I hardly ever say Damn without saying Un-damn to myself afterwards.  It seems a pity to waste a precious word on an inadequate cause, and I always retrieve it if I can.”

“Before you came down to breakfast this morning, Kew,” said Anonyma, “we had an idea.”

“Only one between you in all that time?” said Kew.  “I was half an hour late.”

“Now, Kew, be an angel and agree with the idea.  I’ve set my heart on it,” said Mrs. Gustus.

When Mrs. Gustus talked in a womanly way like this, the change was always unmistakable.  She was naturally an unnatural talker, and when she mentioned such natural things as angels, you knew she was resorting deliberately to womanly charm in order to attain her end.  There was something very cold-blooded about Anonyma’s womanly charm.