She ended by rising abruptly and wishing them good-night.  Her outburst had silenced Joan’s impish drummer, for the time.  He appeared to be nervous and depressed, but bucked up again on the way to the bus.  Greyson walked with her as usual.  They took the long way round by the outer circle.

“Poor Mary!” he said.  “I should not have talked before her if I had thought.  Her horror of war is almost physical.  She will not even read about them.  It has the same effect upon her as stories of cruelty.”

“But there’s truth in a good deal that she says,” he added.  “War can bring out all that is best in a people; but also it brings out the worst.  We shall have to take care that the ideals are not lost sight of.”

“I wish this wretched business of the paper hadn’t come just at this time,” said Joan:  “just when your voice is most needed.

“Couldn’t you get enough money together to start something quickly,” she continued, the idea suddenly coming to her.  “I think I could help you.  It wouldn’t matter its being something small to begin with.  So long as it was entirely your own, and couldn’t be taken away from you.  You’d soon work it up.”

“Thanks,” he answered.  “I may ask you to later on.  But just now—­” He paused.

Of course.  For war you wanted men, to fight.  She had been thinking of them in the lump:  hurrying masses such as one sees on cinema screens, blurred but picturesque.  Of course, when you came to think of it, they would have to be made up of individuals—­gallant-hearted, boyish sort of men who would pass through doors, one at a time, into little rooms; give their name and address to a soldier man seated at a big deal table.  Later on, one would say good-bye to them on crowded platforms, wave a handkerchief.  Not all of them would come back.  “You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs,” she told herself.

It annoyed her, that silly saying having come into her mind.  She could see them lying there, with their white faces to the night.  Surely she might have thought of some remark less idiotic to make to herself, at such a time.

He was explaining to her things about the air service.  It seemed he had had experience in flying—­some relation of his with whom he had spent a holiday last summer.

It would mean his getting out quickly.  He seemed quite eager to be gone.

“Isn’t it rather dangerous work?” she asked.  She felt it was a footling question even as she asked it.  Her brain had become stodgy.

“Nothing like as dangerous as being in the Infantry,” he answered.  “And that would be my only other alternative.  Besides I get out of the drilling.”  He laughed.  “I should hate being shouted at and ordered about by a husky old sergeant.”

They neither spoke again till they came to the bridge, from the other side of which the busses started.

“I may not see you again before I go,” he said.  “Look after Mary.  I shall try to persuade her to go down to her aunt in Hampshire.  It’s rather a bit of luck, as it turns out, the paper being finished with.  I shouldn’t have quite known what to do.”