end of five minutes more they had told each other where they were going, where they had been, what their husbands were, the number, age, and girth of their children, and all the adjectives that might most conveniently be used to describe their servants.  The adjectives, very lurid ones, took some time.  Priscilla shut her eyes while they were going on, thankful to be left quiet, feeling unstrung to the last degree; and she gradually dropped into an uneasy doze whose chief feature was the distressful repetition, like hammer-strokes on her brain, of the words, “You’re deteriorating—­deteriorating—­deteriorating.”

“Lieber Gott,” she whispered at last, folding her hands in her lap, “don’t let me deteriorate too much.  Please keep me from wanting to box people’s ears. Lieber Gott, it’s so barbarous of me.  I never used to want to.  Please stop me wanting to now.”

And after that she dropped off quite, into a placid little slumber.

III

They crossed from Calais in the turbine.  Their quickest route would have been Cologne-Ostend-Dover, and every moment being infinitely valuable Fritzing wanted to go that way, but Priscilla was determined to try whether turbines are really as steady as she had heard they were.  The turbine was so steady that no one could have told it was doing anything but being quiescent on solid earth; but that was because, as Fritzing explained, there was a dead calm, and in dead calms—­briefly, he explained the conduct of boats in dead calms with much patience, and Priscilla remarked when he had done that they might then, after all, have crossed by Ostend.

“We might, ma’am, and we would be in London now if we had,” said Fritzing.

They had, indeed, lost several hours and some money coming by Calais, and Fritzing had lost his temper as well.

Fritzing, you remember, was sixty, and had not closed his eyes all night.  He had not, so far as that goes, closed his eyes for nights without number; and what his soul had gone through during those nights was more than any soul no longer in its first youth should be called upon to bear.  In the train between Cologne and Calais he had even, writhing in his seat, cursed every single one of his long-cherished ideals, called them fools, shaken his fist at them; a dreadful state of mind to get to.  He did not reveal anything of this to his dear Princess, and talking to her on the turbine wore the clear brow of the philosopher; but he did feel that he was a much-tried man, and he behaved to the maid Annalise exactly in the way much-tried men do behave when they have found some one they think defenceless.  Unfortunately Annalise was only apparently defenceless.  Fritzing would have known it if he had been more used to running away.  He did, in his calmer moments, dimly opine it.  The plain fact was that Annalise held both him and Priscilla in the hollow of her hand.