“Well—­it’s his honour now.”

“That’s what they all say, Michael and Anthony, and Dorothy.  They’re men and they don’t know.  Dorothy’s more a man than a woman.

“But you’re different.  I thought you might help me to keep him—­they say you’ve got some tremendous secret.  And this is the way you go on!”

“I wouldn’t help you to keep him if I could.  I wouldn’t have kept Nicky for all the world.  Aunt Frances wouldn’t have kept him.  She wants Michael to go.”

“She doesn’t.  If she says she does she lies.  All the women are lying.  Either they don’t care—­they’re just lumps, with no hearts and no nerves in them—­or they lie.

“It’s this rotten pose of patriotism.  They get it from each other, like—­like a skin disease.  No wonder it makes Michael sick.”

“Men going out—­thousands and thousands and thousands—­to be cut about and blown to bits, and their women safe at home, snuffling and sentimentalizing—­

“Lying—­lying—­lying.”

“Who wouldn’t?  Who wouldn’t tell one big, thumping, sacred lie, if it sends them off happy?”

“But we’re not lying.  It’s the most real thing that ever happened to us.  I’m glad Nicky’s going.  I shall be glad all my life.”

“It comes easy to you.  You’re a child.  You’ve never grown up.  You were a miserable little mummy when you were born.  And now you look as if every drop of blood was drained out of your body in your teens.  If that’s your tremendous secret you can keep it yourself.  It seems to be all you’ve got.”

“If it wasn’t for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony it would have been all I’ve got.”

Vera looked at her daughter and saw her for the first time as she really was.  The child was not a child any more.  She was a woman, astonishingly and dangerously mature.  Veronica’s sorrowful, lucid eyes took her in; they neither weighed her nor measured her, but judged her, off-hand with perfect accuracy.

“Poor little Ronny.  I’ve been a beastly mother to you.  Still, you can thank my beastliness for Aunt Frances and Uncle Anthony.”

Veronica thought:  “How funny she is about it!” She said, “It’s your beastliness to poor Larry that I mind.  You know what you’re keeping him for.”

* * * * *

She knew; and Lawrence knew.

That night he told her that if he hadn’t wanted to enlist he’d be driven to it to get away from her.

And she was frightened and held her tongue.

Then she got desperate.  She did things.  She intrigued behind his back to keep him; and he found her out.

He came to her, furious.

“You needn’t lie about it,” he said.  “I know what you’ve done.  You’ve been writing letters and getting at people.  You’ve told the truth about my age and you’ve lied about my health.  You’ve even gone round cadging for jobs for me in the Red Cross and the Press Bureau and the Intelligence Department, and God only knows whether I’m supposed to have put you up to it.”