Having finished her stitching, she put her little wicker-work basket aside on the chest-of-drawers and took out the handkerchief-sachet in which she kept all his letters. She read each one over again.... "I'll finish mine to him to-night," she decided. "It'll go off before eight in the morning, then; save a post."
From under her work-basket she took her blotting-pad. The letter to Paul was between the leaves, with her fountain-pen that she'd used at school. She sat down in the wicker-seated chair before the dressing-table and leaned her pad up against the edge of that table, with her brushes and comb, her wicker-cased bottle of eau-de-Cologne, her pot of skin-cream and her oval hand-mirror, its silver back embossed by Reynolds' immortal group of cherubs whose curly heads and soft, tip-tilted faces were not unlike Gwenna's own as she sat there, reading over what she had already put in that letter to the Front.
It began in what Gwenna considered an admirably sedate and old-fashioned style: "My dearest Husband." She thought: "The Censor, whoever he is! that Paul talks about—when he reads that he'll think it's from somebody quite old and been married for ten years, perhaps; instead of only just—what is it—seven weeks!"
It went on to acknowledge the last note from Paul and to ask him if she should send him some more cigarettes, and to beg that he would, if he could possibly, possibly manage it, get one of his friends to take a snapshot of him—Paul—in uniform, as Gwenna had never yet seen him.
Beside the swung oval mirror on the dressing-table there was set up in a silver frame the only portrait that she possessed of her boy-husband: the glazed picture postcard that Gwenna had bought that Saturday in May, when she had gone to see the flying at Hendon with her two friends from the Westminster Office, Mabel Butcher and Ottilie Becker.
Gwenna's eyes fell on that photograph as she raised them from her pad. Her thoughts, going back to that afternoon, suggested the next item to be written to Paul.
And the young girl wrote on, in much the same style as she would have talked, with few full stops and so much underlining that some words seemed to have a bar of music below them.
"You remember my telling you about Miss Becker, the German girl that I used to be at Westminster with, when we used to call ourselves the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker? Well, what do you think? She has been taken away from her boarding-house where she was in Bloomsbury, and interned in some camp as an alien enemy, although she is a girl, and they say she nearly was just on trial as a spy!
"Mabel Butcher wrote and told me about it. She (Miss Butcher) went with Ottilie Baker when she had to register herself as an alien at Somerset House, just after the War broke out, and she said it was awful, a great place like six National Galleries rolled into one, and miles of immense long corridors, and simply crowds of all kinds of Germans and Austrians, just like a queue at the theatre, waiting to be registered, and all looking scared to death, quite a lot of pretty girls among them, too.
"Poor Ottilie Becker cried like anything at having to go, and to be an enemy alien, you know she'd got such heaps of friends in England and liked lots of English ways. She used to have a bath every morning, even. I hate to think of her being a prisoner. Of course I know one ought to feel that all Germans ought to be wiped out now," wrote Gwenna, "but it makes you feel sort of different when it's a girl you've known and had lots of little jokes with, and I was with her the very first time I heard of you, so I shan't be able to help always feeling a little kinder about her.