of less use as a padre than all the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys they are sending, it's not for me to protest. They may be right. I may be absolutely useless as a chaplain. On the other hand, I may not. They apparently don't intend to give themselves a chance of finding out. Very well. It's nothing to me, either way.'

'Oh, that's all right then,' Johnny said.

4

No one could say that the Potter press did not rise to the great opportunity. The press seldom fails to do this. The Potter press surpassed itself; it nearly surpassed its great rival presses. With energy and whole-heartedness it cheered, comforted, and stimulated the people. It never failed to say how well the Allies were getting on, how much ammunition they had, how many men, what indomitable tenacity and cheerful spirits enlivened the trenches. The correspondents it employed wrote home rejoicing; its leading articles were noble hymns of praise. In times of darkness and travail one cannot but be glad of such a press as this. So glad were the Government of it that Mr. Potter became, at the end of 1916, Lord Pinkerton, and his press the Pinkerton press. Of course, that was not the only reward he obtained for his services; he figured every new year in the honours' list, and collected in succession most of the letters of the alphabet after his name. With it all, he remained the same alert, bird-like, inconspicuous person, with the same unswerving belief in his own methods and his own destinies, a belief which never passed from self-confidence to self-importance. Unless you were so determined a hater of Potterism as to be blindly prejudiced, you could not help liking Lord Pinkerton.

5

Jane, sulking because she could not fight, thought for a short time that she would nurse, and get abroad that way. Then it became obvious that too many fools were scrambling to get sent abroad, and anyhow, that, if Clare was nursing, it must be a mug's game, and that there must be a better field for her own energies elsewhere. With so many men going, there would be empty places to fill…. That thought came, perhaps, as soon to Jane as to any one in the country.

Her father's lady secretary went nursing, and Lord Pinkerton, well aware of his younger daughter's clearheaded competence, offered Jane the job, at a larger salary.

'Your shorthand would soon come back if you took it up,' he told her. For he had had all his children taught shorthand at a young age; in his view it was one of the essentials of education; he had learned it himself at the age of thirteen, and insulted his superior young gentlemen private secretaries by asking them if they knew it. Jane and Johnny, who had been in early youth very proficient at it, had, since they were old enough to know it was a sort of low commercial cunning, the accomplishment of the slave, hidden their knowledge away like a vice. When concealed from observation and pressed for time, they had furtively taken down lecture notes in it at Oxford, but always with a consciousness of guilt.

Jane had declined the secretaryship. She did not mean to be that sort of low secretary that takes down letters, she did not mean to work for the Potter press, and she thought it would be needlessly dull to work for her father. She said, 'No, thank you, dad. I'm thinking of the Civil Service.'

That was early in 1915, when women had only just begun to think of, or be thought of, by the Civil Service. Jane did not think of it with enthusiasm; she wanted to be a journalist and to write; but it would do for the time, and would probably be amusing. So, owing to the helpful influence of Mr. Potter, and a good degree, Jane obtained a quite good post at the Admiralty, which she had to swear never to mention, and went into rooms in a square off Fleet Street with Katherine Varick, who had a research fellowship in chemistry and worked in a laboratory in Farringdon Street.

The Admiralty was all right. It was interesting as such jobs go, and Jane, who was clear-headed, did it well. She got to know a few men and women who, she considered, were worth knowing, though, in technical departments such as the Admiralty, the men were apt to be superior to the women; the women Jane met there were mostly non-University lower-grade clerks, and so forth, nice, cheery young things, but rather stupid, who thought it jolly for Jane to be connected with Leila Yorke and the Potter press, and were scarcely worth undeceiving. And naval officers, though charming, were apt to be a little elementary, Jane discovered, in their general outlook.

However, the job was all right; not a bad plum to have picked out of the hash, on the whole. And the life was all right. The rooms were jolly (only the new geyser exploded too often), and Katherine Varick, though she made stinks in the evenings, not bad to live with, and money not too scarce, as money goes, and theatres and dinners frequent. Doing one's bit, putting one's shoulder to the wheel, proving the mettle of the women of England, certainly had its agreeable side.

6

In intervals of office work and social life, Jane was writing odds and ends, and planning the books she meant to write after the war. She hadn't settled her line yet. Articles on social and industrial questions for the papers, she hoped, for one thing; she had plenty to say on this head. Short stories. Poems. Then, perhaps, a novel…. About the nature of the novel Jane was undecided, except that it would be more unlike the novels of Leila Yorke than any novels had ever been before. Perhaps a sarcastic, rather cynical novel about human nature, of which Jane did not think much. Perhaps a serious novel, dealing with social or political conditions. Perhaps an impressionist novel, like Dorothy Richardson's. Only they were getting common; they were too easy. One could hardly help writing like that, unless one tried not to, if one had lately read any of them.

Most contemporary novels Jane found very bad, not worth writing. Those solemn and childish novels about public schools, for instance, written by young men. Jane wondered what a novel about Roedean or Wycombe Abbey would be like. The queer thing was that some young woman didn't write one; it need be no duller than the young men's. Rather duller, perhaps, because schoolgirls were more childish than schoolboys, the problems of their upbringing less portentous. But there were many of the same ingredients—the exaltation of games, hero-worship, rows, the clever new literary mistress who made all the stick-in-the-mud other mistresses angry…. Only were the other mistresses at girls' schools stick-in-the-mud? No, Jane thought not; quite a decent modern set, on the whole, for people of their age. Better than schoolmasters, they must be.

How dull it all was! Some woman ought to do it, but not Jane.

Jane was inclined, in her present phase, to think the Russians and the French the only novelists. They had manner and method. But they were both too limited in their field, too much concerned with sexual relations, that most tedious of topics (in literature, not life), the very thought of which made one yawn. Queer thing, how novelists couldn't leave it alone. It was, surely, like eating and drinking, a natural element in life, which few avoid; but the most exciting, jolly, interesting, entertaining things were apart from it. Not that Jane was not quite willing to accept with approval, as part of the game of living, such episodes in this field as came her way; but she could not regard them as important. As to marriage, it was merely dowdy. Domesticity; babies; servants; the companionship of one man. The sort of thing Clare would go in for, no doubt. Not for Jane, before whom the world lay, an oyster asking to be opened.

She saw herself a journalist; a