A woman can't knock about the waste spaces of the earth by herself, head
a rabble of pack-carrying savages, without gaining some experience in
organization. In fact, when I'm not at my own hospital, which now runs on
wheels, I'm employed as a sort of organizing expert--any old where they
choose to send me. Do you think I'm talking swollen-headedly, Colonel
Lackaday?"

She turned suddenly round on him, with a defiant flash of her brown eyes,
which was one of her characteristics---the woman, for all her capable
modernity, instinctively on the defensive.

"It's only a fool who apologizes for doing a thing well," said Lackaday.

"He couldn't do it well if he was a fool," Lady Auriol retorted.

"You never know what a fool can do till you try him," said Lackaday.

It was a summer morning. Nearly all the house-party had gone to church.
Lady Auriol, Colonel Lackaday and I, smitten with pagan revolt, lounged on
the shady lawn in front of the red-brick, gabled manor house. The air was
full of the scent of roses from border beds and of the song of thrushes
and the busy chitter-chatter of starlings in the old walnut trees of
the further garden. It was the restful England which the exiled and the
war-weary used so often to conjure up in their dreams.

"You mean a fool can be egged on to do great things and still remain a
fool?" asked Lady Auriol lazily.

Lackaday smiled--or grinned--it is all the same--a weaver of fairy nothings
could write a delicious thesis on the question; is Lackaday's smile a grin