His smile was friendly, and Rachel found it pleasant to be advised by him.  As to employing prisoners, she said, even were it allowed, nothing would induce her to risk it.  There were a good many on Colonel Shepherd’s estate, and she sometimes met them, bicycling to and from their billets in the village, in the evening after work.  “Once or twice they’ve jeered at me,” she said, flushing.

“Jeered at you!” he repeated in surprise.

“At my dress, I mean.  It seems to amuse them.”

“I see.  You wear the land army dress like these girls?”

“When I’m at work.”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t wear it always,” he said candidly.  “These girls here look awfully nice of an evening.  They always change.”

He glanced at her curiously.  Her dress of dark blue linen, her pretty hat to match, with its bunch of flowers, not to speak of the slender ankles and feet in their blue stockings and khaki shoes, seemed to him extraordinarily becoming.  But she puzzled him.  There was something about her quite different from the girls of the hostel.  She appeared to be older and riper than they; yet he did not believe she was a day more than five-and-twenty, and some of them were older than that.  Unmarried, he supposed.  “Miss Henderson?” Yes, he was sure that was the name Mrs. Fergusson had mentioned.  His eyes travelled discreetly to her bare, left hand.  That settled it.

“Well, if I came across these fellows jeering at an Englishwoman, I’d know the reason why!” he resumed hotly.  “You should have complained.”

She shook her head, smiling.  “One doesn’t want to be a nuisance in war time.  One can always protect oneself.”

He smiled.

“That’s what women always say, and—­excuse me—­they can’t!”

She laughed.

“Oh, yes, we can—­the modern woman.”

“I don’t see much difference between the modern woman and the old-fashioned woman,” he said obstinately.  “It isn’t dress or working at munitions that makes the difference.”

“No, but—­what they signify.”

“What?—­a freer life, getting your own way, seeing more of the world?” The tone was a trifle antagonistic.

“Knowing more of the world,” she said, quietly.  “We’re not the ignorant babes our grandmothers were at our age.  That’s why we can protect ourselves.”

And again he was aware of something sharp or bitter in her—­some note of disillusionment—­that jarred with the soft, rather broad face and dreamy eyes.  It stirred him, and they presently found themselves plunged in a free and exciting discussion of the new place and opportunities of women in the world, the man from the more conservative, the women from the more revolutionary point of view.  Secretly, he was a good deal repelled by some of his companion’s opinions, and her expression of them.  She quoted Wells and Shaw, and he hated both.  He was an idealist and a romantic, with a volume of poems in his pocket.