“Don’t you like it?” disappointed at the silence of her comrades, broken only by Gillian’s one caustic comment. “I shall have to get it properly trimmed and trained at a hairdresser’s, of course. But I think it suits me, rather....”
“What are you going to do with your shorn femininity?” Gillian pointed to the showers of long hair lying about the carpet. “You can’t leave it here, you know—Theo’s so awfully impressionable.”
“My shorn femininity,” said Deb, gathering it up in her arms, “shall go into a brown paper parcel and be sold for the benefit of the Red Cross—‘And nothing in life became it like its death!’”
IV
For a space of time parallel to this discussion, four men were sitting in Blair Stevenson’s library, drinking whisky and soda, and lazily depreciating the first-night play they had just witnessed, and of which Theo Pandos had to supply a dramatic criticism for “The Dawn.” He was dashing down his copy now, and occasionally pleading with Cliffe Kennedy to hold back his comic reminiscences about the Censorship, for just a few minutes longer.
“Why they don’t sack you——!”
“I’m a highly useful servant of the State,” Cliffe rejoined. “And I’ve never before had as big a private mail as I liked. I used to read my own letters and my mother’s, and my little sister Beth’s; and the letters of any stray guest who happened to be in the house, and the servants’ letters—and even then I wasn’t satisfied. Now I can glut myself opening letters.” He told a few more incredible and very delightful tales of these same letters. And then Pandos flung down the fountain-pen, to intimate he had finished a column of the “death-by-a-thousand-slices,” for which he had made a name, took up his glass of whisky and soda; and the conversation, as was usual directly he touched it, pivoted round to the subject of women....
“I don’t understand girls nowadays,” confessed the fourth of the quartette, who was little Timothy Fawcett of the Royal Flying Corps. Having been a whole year on continuous active service in France, he was now stationed at Hendon for a few months respite of light home duty.
Timothy was rather a nice boy. He was fair and shy and solemn, with those soft cherub curves to his mouth that remind one of dewy sleep and of a mother fondly shading the candle from the eyes of her baby son in his cradle. And his innocent appearance did not call for the conventional corollary that it masked the biggest dare-devil in the squadron. His appearance coincided exactly with his disposition. Timothy was undoubtedly both shy and solemn, with wits that moved but slowly, and nerves and courage as steady as his steady questioning blue eyes.
“I don’t understand women nowadays,” he began. And Blair, with whom he was rather a favourite, said encouragingly: