"Don't go, Emily. Don't shove off for a second. I only get wound up like this once in a blue moon, and I'd better get it off my chest now once and for all. Don't imagine I think these Miss Smedleys represent women war-workers. I know they're a minority, but they represent a type. I know something about the other sort—the ones who've helped us to bash the Hun, and they make me feel like a piffling slacker sometimes. How would you like to stand on your feet for twelve hours a day doing acetylene gas welding, or ride eighty miles carrying spare parts on a stink-bike through a snow blizzard—not once, but as a daily routine? I was shipmates with a bloke whose sister did that for two consecutive years. How would you like swabbing out a gangrened wound in a part of a man's anatomy polite civilisation makes him hide under clothes—-? Don't raise your eyebrows, Emily! The point I'm driving at is that thousands of women do these things, and somehow manage to remain women——" He mused reminiscently upon a then recent article in Blackwood's Magazine—"Even when they pull off their petticoats and put on breeches to plough an acre a day."
"I am sorry," said Lady Manners, on the threshold of the hall. "But I quite fail to see the application of all this—this rant."
"It applies to Josephine Smedley and her kidney," replied the seeker-after-ideal-womanhood. "It is my 'statement in mitigation.' You, my dear Emily, having donned the black cap and condemned me to a tea-party with the lady in question, cannot do less than listen to my views." Graeme beamed at her irate ladyship, his ill-humour blown away on the winds of vehemence. "And now here is Malcolm bowed down with the affairs of the nation."
Sir Malcolm Manners, who wore a preoccupied air and carried a sheaf of letters in his hand, entered as Graeme spoke. He was a meagre individual with absent blue eyes and a drooping moustache tinted by nicotine. His thin grey hair was parted unsymmetrically down the centre, and one wisp, perpetually overlooked or rebellious against restraint, stuck up from the crown like a cock's tail in miniature.
He stopped when he saw his wife and referred fussily to the letters he carried, as if to refresh his mind from notes preparatory to making a speech.
"We must go up to town for a few days, Emily. These fellows are going to muddle everything without someone on the spot."
By "someone" he meant himself. The baronet was Chairman of a Committee charged with the task of repatriating certain classes of refugees. The refugees having no wish to be repatriated and the Committee boasting not a single business man in its composition, matters were not progressing as rapidly—so said the type-written report in the Chairman's hands—as could be hoped.
"Ha!" said the lady, scenting muddle like a war-horse sniffing battle. There are women who rush to straighten out other people's affairs with a gusto only equalled by the discovery of dust in their own rooms. They make admirable housewives. Then, somehow, into the pleasurable anticipation of good work ahead, of fussy Committee meetings and the rounding up of expostulating unintelligibles, there floated the recollection of Graeme into their minds.
"You don't mind if we run away for a few days, Graeme—you can amuse yourself all right till we come back I dare say? It's a nuisance—but you know what these confounded fellows are if you leave them to themselves."
Sir Malcolm brandished the papers in vague admonition of his absent fellow-repatriators.