“So you’ve joined the Hallelujah Army, Roger?” she said, in that muffled, indifferent tone.

“Yes,” he murmured.

“Do you preach in the streets?” Her voice shook.

“Yes,” he whispered.

She gave the cap another turn on her hand.  “Are you happy?” she asked, again indifferently.

“Yes,” he whispered.

She flung the cap down on the table and stretched out her arms to him.  “Oh, my boy!” she cried.  “Oh, my boy, I am so glad you are happy at last!” Love itself seemed to have spread its strong wings in the room, and the others gazed astonished until they saw her flinch, as Roger crumpled up and fell on her breast, and visibly force herself to be all soft, mothering curves to him.

Ellen cast down her eyes and stared at the floor.  Roger’s sobbing made a queer noise.  Ahe ... ahe ... ahe....  It had an unmechanical sound, like the sewing-machine at home before it quite wore out, or Richard’s motor-bicycle when something had gone wrong; and this spectacle of a mother giving heaven to her son by forgery of an emotion was an unmechanical situation.  It must break down soon.  She looked across at Richard and found him digging his nails into the palms of his hands, but not so dejected as she might have feared.  It struck her that he was finding an almost gross satisfaction in the very wrongness of the situation which was making her grieve—­which must, she realised with a stab of pain, make everyone grieve who was not themselves tainted with that wrongness.  He would rather have things as they were, and see his mother lacerating her soul by feigning an emotion that should have been natural to her, and his half-brother showing himself a dolt by believing her, than see them embracing happily as uncursed mothers and their children do.  Uneasily she shifted her eyes from his absorbed face to the far view of the river and the marshes.

“Oh, mother!” spluttered Roger, coming up to the surface of his emotion.  “I’m a rich man now!  I’ve got Jesus, and you, and Poppy!  Mother, this is Poppy, and I’m going to marry her as soon as I can.”

The woman in uniform looked at the window when Marion turned to her, as if she would have liked to jump through it.  One could imagine her alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some small animal with a shrew’s stringy snout, and running home on short hindlegs into a drain.  She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and abjectly:  “I didn’t want to come.”

Marion answered smoothly:  “But now that you are here, how glad I am that you have,” and took her two hands and patted them.  Looking round benevolently at Ellen and back at Lieutenant Poppy, she exclaimed:  “I’m a lucky woman to have two daughters given me in one week.”  She was behaving like an old mother in an advertisement, like the silver-haired old lady who leads the home circle in its orgy of eating Mackintosh’s toffee or who reads the Weekly Telegraph in plaques