"Mrs. Paul Dampier."
It was scrawled and hurried and in pencil. It began:
"My darling Wife." It told her to address to the War Office until she heard from him, and that she would hear from him whenever he could manage it. It ended up, "I was so jolly proud of you because you took it like that, you can't think. I always thought you were a sweet Little Thing. I knew you'd be a plucky Little Thing too. Bless you. It's going to be all right.
"Your affectionate husband,
"P. D."
It was Leslie who cried herself to sleep that night; not Gwenna Dampier.
Only gradually the girl came out of the stupor that had helped her, to the realisation of what had really happened. He'd gone! She'd been left—without him! But as one source of help disappeared, another came to hand.
It was that queer mixture of feelings that the more enlightened young women at the Club would have called "The conventional point of view."
Miss Armitage at the Club tea-table said to her friends, "Nayowh, I don't consider them at all 'splendid,' as you call it, these girls who go about quite smiling and happily after their husbands have embarked for the War. Saying good-bye without shedding a tear, indeed; and all that kind of thing. Shows they can't care much. Heartless! Unsensitive! Callous, I call them."
The art-student with the Trilby hair, who was never quite certain whether she agreed with all Miss Armitage's views or whether she didn't, remarked that really—really anybody who'd seen Miss Williams' face when that young man called for her couldn't help thinking that she cared. Most awfully. If she didn't make a fuss, it must be because she was rather brave.
"Brive? I don't call it that," declared Miss Armitage. "It's just 'the thing to do' among those people. They've made a regular idol of this stupid, deadening Convention of theirs. They all want to be alike. 'Plucky.' 'Not showing anything.' Pah! I call it crushing out their own individuality for the sake of an ideal that isn't anything very much, if you ask me. They all catch it from each other, these wretched Army men's wives. It's no more credit to them than it is to some kinds of dogs not to howl when you hold them up by their tiles."