dandelion for affections of the blood. Then I was shown the oak presses
full of linen white as snow and laid up in lavender. This inventory
being concluded, I was presented with a key of the front door to mark my
admission into the freedom of the house, and invited to take a glass of
Burgundy while Sykes was unpacking my kit upstairs.

Madame, it seemed, was a widow of eighty-five years of age, without
issue, and if her eyes were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth,
as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that
_rentier_ class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town
which serves as G.H.Q.--a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and
which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of
quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth
Madame had kept a _pension_ and had had English demoiselles among her
charges. She had never been to England but she had heard of "Hyde Park."
Did I know it? She received my assurance with obvious gratification as
though it established a personal intimacy between us. "Avez-vous tué des
Allemands?" My negative answer left her disappointed but hopeful.

"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?" interjected the _bonne_, who, I
afterwards found, had a husband at the war. Those interrogatories were
to become very familiar to me. Every evening, when I returned from my
visits to Divisional and Brigade Headquarters, mistress and servant
always put me through the same catechism:

"Avez-vous tué des Allemands?"

"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?"

The immense seriousness, not to say solicitude, with which these