We are both in it, but the initiative rests with her.  She asks me to take two Belgian refugees and the housemaid and the dog and the laundry-hamper along with me in the two-seater to the station, to save petrol.  Well, I am willing.  She fills the herbaceous border with alternating potatoes and carnations.  Well, I am more than willing.  She bottles peas and beans.  And I say to you that I am proud and happy that she should think of these things.

Above all she gets at the very root of the food problem.  I should say that here she has advantages over some, as I belong to the class of husband known as Easily Fed.  She has got hold of a whole sheaf of leaflets from the War Office or somewhere—­“When is a pie not a pie?” “Leave out the egg;” “How to make something out of something else,” etc., etc.; and we feed on those chiefly.  She knows I don’t like rabbits, and yet I am well aware that rabbits are repeatedly insinuated in such forms as not to leave a single clue.  I cannot tell you how I admire and approve.  Still it makes me thoughtful sometimes.

No doubt you will believe that we are being drawn together by sharing these hardships.  Well, yes.  In a way.  And yet I don’t feel easy about it.  We are quite in sympathy, but there is a difference in our point of view.  Mine, I affirm, is the nobler.  I economize, although I loathe it; while she, I am convinced, is beginning to like it.  I don’t mean to say that she does it on purpose, but that phrase may give you an idea what I mean.  I sometimes wonder wistfully if the hand that put that ugly new steel contraption at the back of the fire to save the coal is really the hand that I wooed and won ten years ago.  I see in her the steady growth of an implacable conscience.  In moments of depression I have a horrid feeling that she always wanted to do this sort of thing and never got a real chance till now.

We were extraordinarily happy before the War.  We were not at all hard up and we had no compunctions about spending money.  But now—­I wonder how long the War will last?  What I am afraid of is the formation of habits.  I am already guarding against it by talking about all the things that we are going to do after the War.  She quite agrees with me about them, but she isn’t enthusiastic.  I put my claims pretty high.  The garden is to be reconstructed, and I am adding a wing to the house.  We are going to travel first, and I am not sure that we shan’t have a new cook.  And we are to have an Airedale and an Axminster, and a Stilton and a new Panama.

As a matter of fact that is all bluff on my part.  I only want to have something in hand to bargain with.  If I can ever get back to the status quo ante I will not ask for annexations.

Well, that is how it is.  Most eagerly do I fall in with her latest suggestion that I should let her clean my flannel suit with benzine (I don’t like the smell of it) instead of getting a new one.  Only I live in a growing fear that the day when peace is signed in Europe will be the signal for an outbreak of a new form of warfare in our happy home.