or is his grin a smile? Anyhow, whatever may be the definition of the
special ear-to-ear white-teeth-revealing contortion of his visage, it had
in it something wistful, irresistible. You will find it in the face of a
tickled baby six months old. He touched his row of ribbons.

"_Voila_," said he.

"It's polite to say I don't believe it," she said, regarding him beneath
her long lashes. "But, supposing it true for the sake of argument, I should
very much like to know what kind of a fool you are."

Lying back in her long cane chair, an incarnation of the summer morning,
fresh as the air in her white blouse and skirt, daintily white hosed and
shod, her auburn hair faultlessly dressed sweeping from the side parting in
two waves, one bold from right to left, the other with coquettish grace,
from left to right, the swiftness of her face calmed into lazy contours,
the magnificent full physique of her body relaxed as she lay with her
silken ankles crossed on the nether chair support, her hands fingering a
long necklace of jade, she appealed to me as the most marvellous example I
had ever come across of the woman's power of self-transmogrification.

The last time I had seen her was in France, wet through in old
short-skirted kit, with badly rolled muddy puttees, muddier heavy boots, a
beast of a dripping hat pinned through rain-sodden strands of hair, streaks
of mud over her face, ploughing through mud to a British Field Ambulance,
yet erect, hawk-eyed, with the air of a General of Division. There sex was
wiped out. During our chance meeting, one of the many queer chance meetings
of the war, a meeting which lasted five minutes while I accompanied her to
her destination, we spoke as man to man. She took a swig out of my brandy
flask. She asked me for a cigarette--smoked out, she said. I was in nearly