of Etiquette can be left to be picked up after the smoke has cleared away; and by that time, belike, they will have cleared away with the smoke.  Do you remember that old story of Hans Andersen’s, about the gale that altered the signboards?  Well, I prophesy that a good many signboards will be altered by this blow, up and down England, perhaps even in our little parish.  If it teach us at all to see things as they are, we shall all be known, the rest of our lives, for what we proved ourselves to be in 1914.”

“I saw in this morning’s paper,” said Mrs Steele, “that over at Troy they have an inn called the King of Prussia, and the Mayor and Corporation think of changing its name.”

“Yes,” said her husband gravely; “the Kaiser wrote to the Town Clerk suggesting the Globe as more appropriate:  but the Town Council, while willing to make some alteration, is divided between the Blue Boar and the Boot. . . .  But that reminds me.  If I am to attend your meeting, let us call in the Wesleyan Minister as a set-off.  There’s nothing makes a Woman’s Meeting so womanly as a sprinkling of ministers of religion.”

“Robert, you are talking odiously, and you know it.  I hate people to be satirical or sarcastic.  To begin with, I never understand what they mean, so that I am helpless as well as uncomfortable.”

The Vicar had taken a step or two to the bay-window, where, with hands thrust within his trouser-pockets, he stood staring gloomily out on the bright flower-beds that, next to the comeliness and order of her ministering to the Church—­garnishing of the altar, lustration of the holy vessels, washing and mending of vestments,—­were the pride of Mrs Steele’s life.

     “See how the flowers, as at parade,
      Under their colours stand display’d: 
      Each regiment in order grows,
      That of the tulip, pink, and rose.—­
      O thou, that dear and happy Isle,
      The garden of the world erstwhile,
      Thou Paradise of the four seas
      Which Heaven planted us to please,
      But, to exclude the world, did guard
      With wat’ry, if not flaming, sword;
      Unhappy! shall we never more
      That sweet militia restore? 
      When gardens only had their towers,
      And all the garrisons were flowers. . . .”

He murmured Marvell’s lines to himself and, with a shake of the shoulders coming out of his brown study, swung round to the writing-table again.

“Dear, I beg your pardon! . . .  The truth is, I feel savage with myself:  and, being a condemned non-combatant, I vented it on the most sensitive soul I could find, knowing it to be gentle, and taking care (as you say) to catch and render it helpless.”  He groaned.  “Yes, yes—­I am a brute!  Even now I am using that same tone which you detest.  You do right to detest it.  But will it comfort you a little to know that when a man takes that tone, often enough it’s because he too feels helpless as well as angry?  ‘Mordant’ is the word, I believe:  which means that the poor fool bites you to get his teeth into himself.”