"I don't think I'm well enough for that.… You can get on without me. If things seem to hang fire, get Gerry Deganway to give imitations of His Excellency."
Lady Crawleigh bridled at the suggestion.
"That's not at all a respectful way to speak of your father," she observed reprovingly.
"Well, His ex-Excellency, then. That no better? Sorry. He's very amusing—Gerry, I mean. Why not get father to give imitations of Gerry? In its way, that ought to be just as funny."
Her mother advanced reproachfully to the bed and laid her hand upon the rail.
"If you're not feeling well," she said with incontrovertible logic, "you ought to go to sleep instead of telephoning to people and writing to people. If you're all right, you ought to help with these tiresome creatures. They're your guests."
Barbara felt her own pulse and sighed.
"I'm well enough to write one letter," she said, "and perhaps to get up in time for lunch to-morrow."
Then she hunted among the pillows for a pencil and addressed an envelope to "Eric Lane Esqre, Lashmar Mill-House, Lashmar, Near Winchester, Hants."
She was already tired; perhaps, if she could fix her thoughts on Eric until she fell asleep, she would be spared a second vision of judgement. A dressing-gong sounded in the distance, and she debated whether to abandon her letter to Eric and go down. Gerald Deganway would be simperingly sympathetic. "Your mother tells me you're not feeling very grand" (odious phrase). "Poor you!" (Damnable phrase, damnable creature—with his insecure eye-glass and plastered flaxen hair!) Johnny Carstairs would be pontifical and pretentious—"The unhappy Foreign Office comes in for all the kicks. There's a body of three-pound-a-week gentlemen in Fleet Street who'd enforce a real blockade, 'leave it to the Navy,' don't you know, all that sort of thing. I'm aware of them; I sometimes wish I could have a heart-to-heart talk with them.…" By staying in bed she was at least keeping the promise that she had given to Eric; the sense of surrender was a novel experiment in emotion.