“The wounded?  If you think you’re any more comfort to the wounded than you are to Furny and me I can tell you you’re mistaken.  There was a poor devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me he didn’t mind his wounds and he didn’t mind the Germans; what worried him was the lady being there when he wasn’t able to defend her.”

She tilted her chin at that and said she didn’t want anybody to defend her.

“Perhaps you don’t, but what would you think of a man who didn’t want to defend you?  What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be here?”

“I should like you to want me,” she said.

“No, my dear child, you wouldn’t.  You don’t know what you’re saying.”

And then he said, “I know better than you do what you want.  Men aren’t made like that—­if they are men.  You can’t have it both ways.”  And he said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence on a Feminist line.  She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.

“And our chivalry is to go down before yours?”

“Can’t you have both?”

“Not in war-time. Your chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a danger and a nuisance.”

“Come,” she said, “what about Joan of Arc?” And that was too much for Jimmy.  He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the table as if it gave him some advantage.

“No, no,” he said.  “I can’t stand that rot.  When you’re a saint—­or I’m a saint—­you can talk about Joan of Arc.  If you want to be Joan of Arc go and be it with some man who isn’t your husband—­who isn’t in love with you.  Perhaps he won’t mind.  Go with Furny if you like, though it’s rather hard on him.”

I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola—­if he’d seen the poor child at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over the ruins of several houses and walk by herself—­under shell-fire—­to Zele, because she thought he was there—­

Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he saw her coming towards him in the lounge.  He sighed a long sigh of complicated anguish and satisfaction.

She heard it and she understood it, and she said, “I can’t help it if I am like that.  You’ll have to take the risk of me.  Please go away, Furny.”

And I went.

* * * * *

Norah has been reading what I’ve just written, and she tells me that there’s a great deal about Jimmy’s “joy” and his “adventure” and all that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice.  She says I don’t give a serious impression of him.  He might have gone out to the war just for fun, and that it isn’t fair to him.

I don’t know whether it’s fair or not.  I write as he compels me to write.  I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn’t separate them himself.  I don’t even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the impression he gave me is just that—­of going out for fun.  It was the wild humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.