where they were going, where they had been, what their husbands
were, the number, age, and girth of their children, and all the
adjectives that might most conveniently be used to describe their
servants. The adjectives, very lurid ones, took some time.
Priscilla shut her eyes while they were going on, thankful to be
left quiet, feeling unstrung to the last degree; and she gradually
dropped into an uneasy doze whose chief feature was the distressful
repetition, like hammer-strokes on her brain, of the words, "You're
deteriorating--deteriorating--deteriorating."

"_Lieber Gott_," she whispered at last, folding her hands in her lap,
"don't let me deteriorate too much. Please keep me from wanting to box
people's ears. _Lieber Gott_, it's so barbarous of me. I never used to
want to. Please stop me wanting to now."

And after that she dropped off quite, into a placid little slumber.




III


They crossed from Calais in the turbine. Their quickest route would
have been Cologne-Ostend-Dover, and every moment being infinitely
valuable Fritzing wanted to go that way, but Priscilla was determined
to try whether turbines are really as steady as she had heard they
were. The turbine was so steady that no one could have told it was
doing anything but being quiescent on solid earth; but that was
because, as Fritzing explained, there was a dead calm, and in dead