Selwyn frowned, ‘What a dreadful experience!’ he said.

‘Oh, I don’t know.’  She gave a little shrug of her shoulders, but the spirit of badinage had vanished both from her face and from her voice.  ’It didn’t take long to lose most of one’s illusions.  It is one thing to meet people as Lord Durwent’s daughter, and quite another as a free-lance ambulance-driver.  I’ve seen what people really are since I’ve been on my own, and I’m sick of the whole thing.’

‘You don’t mean that, Elise?’

‘I do.  Men are rotten, and women are cats.’

He smiled quizzically, but she kept her eyes averted from his.  It almost appeared as if she were determined to retain her pose of callousness at any effort, but his sense of psychology told him that his first conjecture was correct.  The girl who had endured was trying to hide herself behind the personality of her old self.

‘My dear girl,’ he said slowly, ’it is an old trick of women to talk for the purpose of convincing themselves.  I don’t care what you have seen—­you could not have passed through the ordeal of these long months and believe in your innermost soul that either men or women are rotten.  In many ways I feel as if what little knowledge I possess dates from last night; and I have learned things about men right here in this ward to-day that have made me humble.  These chaps that we call ignorant, the lower classes—­why, they are superb, wonderful.  I tell you they have greatness in them.  I wish you could have seen them’——­

‘Haven’t I seen them,’ she cried, with a little catch in her throat, ’hundreds and hundreds of times?  Almost every day, and at all hours of the night, I’ve gone to meet the Red Cross trains.  I have seen men die while being lifted out of the ambulance—­men who would try to smile their thanks to us just before the end came.  I have’——­ She caught her hands in a tight grip, and her eyes welled with tears.  ’But they’re just jingoes, I suppose,’ she said, blending a scornfulness with her repressed grief.

‘I have deserved this,’ said Selwyn, his face drawn.  ’Nothing that you can say is half so bitter as my thoughts.’

‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ she said.

’If ever a man was sincere, I was, Elise.  Since I left you at Roselawn I have followed the one path, thinking there was a great light ahead.  Now I am afraid that, perhaps, it was only a mirage.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ she replied vehemently.  ’I hated you for thinking English women would not aid their men to fight, and I wanted never to see you again.  But do you remember when I said that the glory of war was in women’s blood?  There was a certain amount of truth in it at the beginning; for when I first saw the wounded arrive I was madly excited.  I wanted to shout and cheer.  But as the months have gone on, and I have seen our soldiers maimed and bleeding and suffering, while thousands of their women at home have simply broken loose and lost all sense of decency or self-respect—­oh, what’s the use?’