Maynard wriggled uneasily, sliding down the chair in the movement until his knees were very near his chin.

‘He’s a rotter, Elise.’

‘Do you know him?’

’N-no.  But Marian says he absolutely neglects her.  He’s one of those cold-blooded fish—­doesn’t understand her a bit.  After all’—­the extra vehemence shifted him another few inches, so that he presented an extraordinary figure, like the hump of a dromedary—­’women must have sympathy.  They need it.  They’——­

‘Oh, Horace!’ Elise burst into a laugh.  ’Are there really some of you left?  How refreshing!  Why don’t you put it on your card:  “2nd Lt.  Horace Maynard, Grenadier Guards, soul-mate by appointment"?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t laugh like that.’

He was a picture of such utter dejection that, checking her mirth, Elise laid her hand on his arm.  ’Sorry, Horace.  You know, if it hadn’t been for this war we might never have known how nice our men are.  I only wonder how it is that the women have the heart to make such fools of you.’

The unhappy warrior pulled himself up to a fairly upright posture and tapped his cigarette against the palm of his hand.  ‘I’m glad,’ he said with a slight blush, ’that you don’t quite put me down as a rotter.  I don’t know what’s come over us all.  Before the war, when you met a chap’s wife—­well, hang it all!—­she was his wife, and that was all there was about it.  But nowadays’——­

’I know, Horace, it’s a miserable business altogether—­partly war hysteria, and partly the fact that women can’t stand independence, I suppose.  Marian’s a splendid type of the female war-shirker.  You know she’s married; yet, because she lets you maul her’——­

‘I say, Elise!’

’——­and she murmurs pathetically that her husband in France neglects her—­at least, that’s what she tells you.  When she was dressing to-night Marian said that she and her husband absolutely trusted each other.’

‘By Jove!  You don’t mean that?’

’She also said that all men, including you, were a scream.  Probably she considers you a perfect shriek.’

Trembling with indignation, Maynard suddenly collapsed like a punctured balloon and relapsed dejectedly into his recumbent attitude.  ’What an ass I have been!’ he lamented sorrowfully.  ’What a sublime ass!  And Marian—­the little devil!’

‘Rubbish!’

’Eh?  I suppose you think I am an idiot for——­ Well, perhaps you’re right.’

For a couple of minutes nothing was said, and the melancholy lover, with his chin resting on his chest, ruminated over his unhappy affair.

‘Hang it all!’ he said at last, hesitatingly, ’when a chap gets leave from the front he’s—­he’s sort of woman-hungry.  You don’t know what it feels like, after getting away from all that mud and corruption, to hear a girl’s voice—­one of our own.  It goes to the head like bubbly.  It’s a—­a dream come true.  There’s just the two things in your life—­eight or nine months in the trenches; then a fortnight with the company of women again.  It’s awfully soppy to talk like this’——­