CHAPTER I
THE CHARM NEGLECTED
"Few people realize that Love is a hybernating animal."
Extract from Private Letter.
Olwen Howel-jones sat at her War work in room 0369 on the sixth floor of some Government offices called——
We will call them The Honeycomb.
The entrance to this hive of activity was near Charing Cross, and its courtyard was one continual procession of cars, cyclists, motor-cyclists, dispatch cycles with little side-car mail vans, also of men in every conceivable uniform; most of them (as befitted a swarm of such bees!) were decorated with wings.... Goodness knows how many telephone extensions The Honeycomb possessed! Lifts carried you up to floor after floor. Each floor was packed with cells that had been bedrooms and private sitting-rooms, each cell with workers making Victory-honey (and perhaps with odd drones watching them do it). The whole place with its come-and-go of clerks, messengers, telephone girls, civilians, typists, switchboard girls, and their khakied male superiors, was in a never-ending buzz.
The small cell marked 0369 had big windows that looked up and down the Strand: it held three workers.
Olwen's roll-top desk stood back to back with another; the two backs screening off her colleague of the other desk. This other desk had an unusual feature. From behind it there came a stream of comments in different voices, so that it seemed as if several unseen people were sitting there. These voices were:
First Voice—A natural girlish treble that slightly rolled its R's; being the voice of one Mrs. Newton, in charge of cell 0369, who possessed the gift of mimicry.
Second Voice—A masculine drawl that died away of sheer superiority in the roof of the mouth, after the fashion of one Major Leefe of that Department.
Third Voice—Rollicking and boyish, intersected by loud "Ha's" and "Bai Jove's" in the manner of Lieutenant Harold Ellerton, also of The Honeycomb.