Jane's considering eyes weighed Hobart, whose courtesy was still
impregnable. How far was he the complete Potterite, identified with his
absurd press? Did he even appreciate Leila Yorke? She would have liked to
know. But, it seemed, she was not to know from him.


3

The Armistice came.

Then the thing was to get to Paris somehow. Jane had, unusually, not
played her cards well. She had neglected the prospect of peace, which,
after all, must come. When she had, in May, at last taken thought for the
morrow, and applied at the Foreign Office for one of those secret jobs
which could not be mentioned because they prepared the doers to play
their parts after the great unmentionable event, she was too late. The
Foreign Office said they could not take over people from other government
departments.

So, when the unmentionable took place, Jane was badly left. The Foreign
Office Library Department people, many of them Jane's contemporaries at
Oxford and Cambridge, were hurried across the Channel into Life, for
which they had been prepared by a course of lectures on the Dangers of
Paris. There also went the confidential secretaries, the clerks and
shorthand typists, in their hundreds; degreeless, brainless beings, but
wise in their generation.

'I wish I was a shorthand typist,' Jane grumbled, brooding with Katherine
over their fire.