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Mrs St. George looked out into Cardigan Square. The high, Georgian window framed a picture that was seen in winter and in spring, in autumn and in summer, and so familiar had it become to her that it seemed to possess no more than a casual significance. But on this April day, in the year nineteen hundred and eighteen, Mrs St. George saw the square like a face strange with sudden emotion, or a landscape sad with the young greenness of a wintry spring. Standing in the middle of the room she saw this strip framed by the window, the familiar details, the gradations of the vista, the wood-paved roadway touching the curb of the flagged path, the black railings of the garden, the young green of sprouting lilacs and privets, the kind of blue-grey gloom hanging in the sooty shrubberies, the thin green of the London grass, the maculated trunks of the old plane-trees, the spread of their tops, the vague redness of the houses beyond, and above it all a square panel of sky. On this April day a south-west wind moved the branches of the plane-trees; sudden sunshine was followed by sudden shadow; the wet trees would glisten or grow black.

“Abominable!”

She uttered the word aloud, and it was a strange word for so cold and so self-contained a woman to utter. She had been standing there for quite five minutes, holding a letter that had changed the familiar sameness of her outlook upon this London square. She was a tall woman, handsome, fiftyish or more, with one of those firm white faces, and lips that close decisively over very regular teeth. Some one had once called her an Arctic Juno. Her wavy, fair hair had a fallacious softness. Her eyes were very blue.

In a corner, on the right of one of the windows, stood a big bureau, mahogany, capacious and solid. Clara St. George was a woman of affairs, and all her multifarious letters and papers were kept under perfect control. With a deliberate and yet sudden movement she approached her desk, placed her son’s letter on the writing-pad, and glanced at a card upon which various telephone numbers were neatly recorded. The telephone was attached to the wall beside her desk. She rang up the exchange. There was something characteristic of her in the way in which she put out a hand and took down the receiver. The gesture was possessive. Always and firmly she had grasped the desired object and uttered decisively the word “mine”.

“Exchange.—Are you there? Give me 10097.”

She waited. Her blue eyes looked out at the sudden sunlight in the tops of the plane-trees. She stood very still. Never yet had she allowed her body or her emotions to be hurried.

Her eyes grew more hard and attentive.

“Hallo—! Is that Sir Murray Hurder’s? Yes. O, it is you, Sir Murray. Mrs St. George speaking. I have just heard that they are sending my son out to the front. What? Yes, to France. It’s disgraceful. They have passed him as fit. You have known him since he was ten—.”

She paused and stood listening, lips pressed to a pale hardness.

“Shocked—? Naturally. It’s abominable. What, nothing can be done? Yes, of course, I understand—. This brutal business—.”

She hung up the receiver. She glanced at her son’s letter which she had placed on the blotting-pad. Her face expressed resentment. For twenty years or so she had possessed her son, and possessed him as she had never possessed his father. He had never escaped from her firm white hands—and now—! This abominable war had seized him, and after three years of confident security! He had been a delicate child; he was supposed to have a “heart”; he had been given a home-service job with one of the home-service battalions in East Anglia. She had come to regard him as so blessedly unfit and safe.

Those wretched Germans and their March offensive! This exasperating war, with its brutal interferences, its sudden snatching at that which was hers!

She crossed the room and rang the bell, and stood looking out into the familiar square. She was afraid, but she would not let herself acknowledge it. She had been a Smythe, and the Smythes had always stood erect and met life’s impertinences with fine composure. And England of 1918 was so full of impertinences, in its shops and its taxis, in its railway-trains, even in the departments of the Inland Revenue.

“Cummins—I expect Mr Alex to-morrow. He is coming home on leave before going to the front.”

Cummins’ benign spectacles glimmered. She had known Mr Alex at an age when he could fall up or down steps and blood his knees. She had called him her “Lamb”. She looked both frightened and shocked.

“Mr Alex going out—madam!”

Mrs St. George answered her with a slight and dignified movement of the head.