Mary Greyson called on her in the morning, while she was still at breakfast.  She had come from seeing Francis off by an early train from Euston.  He had sent Joan a ring.

“He is so afraid you may not be able to wear it—­that it will not fit you,” said Mary, “but I told him I was sure it would.”

Joan held our her hand for the letter.  “I was afraid he had forgotten it,” she answered, with a smile.

She placed the ring on her finger and held out her hand.  “I might have been measured for it,” she said.  “I wonder how he knew.”

“You left a glove behind you, the first day you ever came to our house,” Mary explained.  “And I kept it.”

She was following his wishes and going down into the country.  They did not meet again until after the war.

Madge dropped in on her during the week and brought Flossie with her.  Flossie’s husband, Sam, had departed for the Navy; and Niel Singleton, who had offered and been rejected for the Army, had joined a Red Cross unit.  Madge herself was taking up canteen work.  Joan rather expected Flossie to be in favour of the war, and Madge against it.  Instead of which, it turned out the other way round.  It seemed difficult to forecast opinion in this matter.

Madge thought that England, in particular, had been too much given up to luxury and pleasure.  There had been too much idleness and empty laughter:  Hitchicoo dances and women undressing themselves upon the stage.  Even the working classes seemed to think of nothing else but cinemas and beer.  She dreamed of a United Kingdom purified by suffering, cleansed by tears; its people drawn together by memory of common sacrifice; class antagonism buried in the grave where Duke’s son and cook’s son would lie side by side:  of a new-born Europe rising from the ashes of the old.  With Germany beaten, her lust of war burnt out, her hideous doctrine of Force proved to be false, the world would breathe a freer air.  Passion and hatred would fall from man’s eyes.  The people would see one another and join hands.

Flossie was sceptical.  “Why hasn’t it done it before?” she wanted to know.  “Good Lord!  There’s been enough of it.”

“Why didn’t we all kiss and be friends after the Napoleonic wars?” she demanded, “instead of getting up Peterloo massacres, and anti-Corn Law riots, and breaking the Duke of Wellington’s windows?”

“All this talk of downing Militarism,” she continued.  “It’s like trying to do away with the other sort of disorderly house.  You don’t stamp out a vice by chivying it round the corner.  When men and women have become decent there will be no more disorderly houses.  But it won’t come before.  Suppose we do knock Militarism out of Germany, like we did out of France, not so very long ago?  It will only slip round the corner into Russia or Japan.  Come and settle over here, as likely as not, especially if we have a few victories and get to fancy ourselves.”