Yet as time passed, and feeling tightened, and the hideous necklace of war grew more and more frightful with each fresh bead of horror strung upon it, Uncle Arthur, though still in principle remaining good, in practice found himself vindictive.  He was saddled; that’s what he was.  Saddled with this monstrous unmerited burden.  He, the most patriotic of Britons, looked at askance by his best friends, being given notice by his old servants, having particular attention paid his house at night by the police, getting anonymous letters about lights seen in his upper windows the nights; the Zeppelins came, which were the windows of the floor those blighted twins slept on, and all because he had married Aunt Alice.

At this period Aunt Alice went to bed with reluctance.  It was not a place she had ever gone to very willingly since she married Uncle Arthur, for he was the kind of husband who rebukes in bed; but now she was downright reluctant.  It was painful to her to be told that she had brought this disturbance into Uncle Arthur’s life by having let him marry her.  Inquiring backwards into her recollections it appeared to her that she had had no say at all about being married, but that Uncle Arthur had told her she was going to be, and then that she had been.  Which was what had indeed happened; for Aunt Alice was a round little woman even in those days, nicely though not obtrusively padded with agreeable fat at the corners, and her skin, just as now, had the moist delicacy that comes from eating a great many chickens.  Also she suggested, just as now, most of the things most men want to come home to,—­slippers, and drawn curtains, and a blazing fire, and peace within one’s borders, and even, as Anna-Rose pointed out privately to Anna-Felicitas after they had come across them for the first time, she suggested muffins; and so, being in these varied fashions succulent, she was doomed to make some good man happy.  But she did find it real hard work.

It grew plain to Aunt Alice after another month of them that Uncle Arthur would not much longer endure his nieces, and that even if he did she would not be able to endure Uncle Arthur.  The thought was very dreadful to her that she was being forced to choose between two duties, and that she could not fulfil both.  It came to this at last, that she must either stand by her nieces, her dead sister’s fatherless children, and face all the difficulties and discomforts of such a standing by, go away with them, take care of them, till the war was over; or she must stand by Arthur.

She chose Arthur.

How could she, for nieces she had hardly seen, abandon her husband?  Besides, he had scolded her so steadily during the whole of their married life that she was now unalterably attached to him.  Sometimes a wild thought did for a moment illuminate the soothing dusk of her mind, the thought of doing the heroic thing, leaving him for them, and helping and protecting the two poor aliens till happier days should return.  If there were any good stuff in Arthur would he not recognize, however angry he might be, that she was doing at least a Christian thing?  But this illumination would soon die out.  Her comforts choked it.  She was too well-fed.  After twenty years of it, she no longer had the figure for lean and dangerous enterprises.