Miss Morganhurst went into her bedroom to dress for dinner, and Tiny-Tee was left, at full length in all her glory, trembling no longer, upon the red lacquer table.

Agatha went downstairs for something, spoke to Fanny, the portress, and returned. Outside the bedroom door, which was ajar, she heard a strange sound, like someone cracking nuts, she described it afterwards. She went in. Miss Morganhurst, her thin grey hair about her neck, clad only in her chemise, was sitting on her bed swinging her bare legs. At sight of Agatha she screeched like a parrot. As Agatha approached she sprang off the bed and advanced at her—her back bent, her fingers bent talon-wise. A stream of words poured from her lips. Every horror, every indecency, every violation of truth and honour that the war had revealed through the press, through books, through letters, seemed to have lodged in that brain. Every murder, every rape, every slaughter of innocent children, every violation of girls and old women—they were all there. She stopped close to Agatha and the words streamed out. At the end of every sentence, with a little sigh, she whispered—"I was there! I was there!... I've seen it."

Agatha, frozen with horror, remained; then, action coming back to her, she fled—Miss Morganhurst pursued her, her bare feet pattering on the carpet. She called Agatha by the name of some obscure German captain.

Agatha found a doctor. When they returned Miss Morganhurst was lying on her face on the floor in the darkness, hiding from what she saw. "I was there, you know," she whispered to the doctor as he put her to bed.

She died next day. Perhaps, after all, many people have felt the war more than one has supposed....

[V]
PETER WESTCOTT

Westcott's astonishment when Edmund Robsart offered to lend his chambers rent free for two months was only equalled by his amazement when he discovered himself accepting that offer. Had you told him a week before that within seven days he would be sleeping in Robsart's sumptuous bed closed in by the rich sanctities of Robsart's sumptuous flat, he would have looked at you with that cool contempt that was one of Westcott's worst features; for Westcott in those days was an arrogant man—arrogant through disgust of himself and disgust of the world—two very poor reasons for arrogance.

This was the way of his accepting Robsart's offer. He had been demobilised at the beginning of March and had realised, with a sudden surprise that seemed only to confirm his arrogance, that he had no one to go and see, no work to do, no place that needed him, no place that he needed. He took a bedroom in a dirty little street off the Strand. He knew that there were two men whom he should look up, Maradick and Galleon. He swore to himself that he would die before he saw either of them. Then, in the Strand, he met Lester, a man whom he had known in his old literary days before the war. Twenty years ago Lester had been a man of much promise, and his novel To Paradise had been read by everyone who wanted a short road to culture. Now the war had definitely dated him and he seemed to belong to the Yellow Book and the Bodley Head and all those days when names were so much more important than performance, and a cover with a Beardsley drawing on it hid a multitude of amateurs.

Westcott did not mind whether or no Lester were dated; he was, for the matter of that, himself dated. It was long indeed since anyone had mentioned Reuben Hallard, or The Vines, or The Stone House. It seemed many ages since he himself had thought of them. He liked Lester, and being a man who, in spite of his loneliness and arrogance, responded at once to kindliness, he accepted Lester's invitation to dinner. He dug up an old dinner jacket that was tight and unduly stretched across his broad shoulders and went to dinner in the Cromwell Road.