"Fancy, two of the men who were at Mr. Swayne's that afternoon are off at the Front to-day," said Gwenna Dampier. "That is, all three, perhaps. Paul said something about his cousin enlisting."
"Poor Hugo Swayne," said Leslie, with a laugh, that she stopped as if she were sorry she had begun it. "It's too bad, really."
"What is? Isn't he enlisting?"
"Yes. Oh, yes, Taffy, he has. But merely enlisting isn't the whole job," said Leslie. "He—to begin with, he could hardly get them to pass him——"
"Why? Too fat?" asked Gwenna mercilessly.
"Fat—Oh, no. They said three weeks' Swedish exercise and drill would take that off. He was quite fit, they said, physically. It was his mental capacity they seemed to doubt," explained Leslie. "Of course that was rather a shock to Hugo to hear, after the years he's been looking up to himself as a rather advanced and enlightened and thinking person. However, he took it very well. He saw what they meant."
"Who were 'they'?" asked Mrs. Crewe.
"The soldier-men he went to first of all, old brother-officers of his father's, who'd been with his father in Egypt, and whom he asked to find him a job of some sort. They told him, quite gently, of course, that they were afraid he was not 'up' to any soldiering job. They said they were afraid there were heaps of young Englishmen like him, awfully anxious to 'do their bits,' but simply not clever enough! (Rather nice, isn't it, the revenge, at last, of the Brainless Army Type on the Cultured Civilian?) And he said to the old Colonel or General or whatever it was, 'I know, sir. I see, sir. Yes, I suppose I have addled myself up by too much reading and too much talk. I know I'm a Stage-Society-and-Café-Royal rotter, and no earthly good at this crisis.' And then he turned round and said quite angrily, 'Why wasn't I brought up to be some use when the time came?' And the old soldier-man said quite quietly, 'My dear Swayne, none of you "enlightened" people believed us that there was any "time" coming. You see now that we were right.' And Hugo said, 'You ought to have hammered it into me. Isn't there anything that I can do, sir?' And at last they got him something."
"What?" demanded Gwenna.
"Well, of course it sounds rather ludicrous when you come to say what it is," admitted Leslie, her mouth curling into a smile that she could not suppress. "But it just shows the Philistines that there is some use (if not beauty) in Futurist painting, after all. One always knew 'there must be something, if one could but find it out.'"