"By Jove, she had done a quick change in five minutes and no mistake!

"She'd got out of the widow's weeds again and into khaki the same as yesterday, except that there was nothing on her curls, and she'd put on a short skirt and little brown brogues and a pair of those silk stockings she bought yesterday; and she came straight up to me and said quietly, 'Now, look here----why were you all upset when you came in?

What's put you out? My being a widow?'

"'No,' I said, straight. 'It wasn't just that, but never mind.'

"'Yes, let's have it out,' she said, and I looked at her standing there in her khaki, but somehow I only saw her in a frock again, and I thought to myself all in a rush, 'All right, you asked to have it out, and you shall,' and so I just blurted out, 'It was seeing you, and knowing all in a minute how much I wanted you myself--and remembering.'

"'Remembering what?' she says as sharp as a needle.

"And I said, 'My dear, I haven't a _bean_.'

"And I grabbed up my hat and gloves and I think I would have said 'Good-bye' and bolted.

"But she just looked at me so that I couldn't.

"Then she looked away and said, 'If beans are all that matter----!' and then she picked a couple of violets out of the vase by that photograph, and tucked them into her jacket, and, just like a kid, said, 'Jim always loved me to have a good time. Jim would like me to have everything I liked, I _know_ he would----'

"And here's where the room seemed to go round and round until it steadied down with me holding her tight....

"Well, then, Miss Olwen----well, then, there we were; engaged! Or practically then," amended little Mr. Brown, his pink face deepening in hue. "It was hours after that that I began to grasp how little it mattered about my not having anything but debts to ask any girl to marry me on; why, great Scott, d'you know who she is? Her Uncle, her hubby's father, is old Jack Robinson of Robinson and Mott; he's got the biggest aeroplane-body business in the Midlands, and he, this Jim of hers----well, she's got all he was to have. He arranged it so. She was to marry again if she liked, and whom she liked. And----Well, she's a girl who might have her pick; apart from the money. Then there's all her money as well; and yet----yet----"

He paused for words just as the band at the other end of the tea-room got the upper hand of the buzz of talk and sent a lilt of insistent melody through the air above the parties.

"_Fancy you fancying me_" was the tune.

"Fancy you fancying me, I can fancy anybody fancying you, But fancy you fancying me."

"Incidental music; jolly appropriate," laughed little Mr. Brown, happily. "What that girl could possibly see in your humble beats me. I expect most people who meet us thinks she's balmy----"

But Olwen, smiling and interested and sympathetically murmuring, was thinking again (secretly) of the Charm.

CHAPTER VIII

RATIONS AND THE CHARM

"A dinner of herbs where Love is."

Proverbs.

"If there is one thing that bores a man," gave out Captain Ross, in a voice like the clashing together of Tube lift-gates--a tone that he had adopted all that evening, since nothing seemed to be going right, "if there is one thing that bores a man stiff, it's when some woman starts in to '_Love_' him."

He paused to glance across the table at Olwen, gaily chattering with Mr.

Ellerton.

"It don't matter what woman," pursued the young Staff-officer inexorably. "_Any_ woman. If he's keen before, that chokes him dead off.

He's not out for any of this Love-with-a-capital-L business that women are such nuts on. Once he's done the chasing, he's gotten all he wants out of it, I guess. Man's a hunter, Mrs. Cartwright."

"I know," cooed his hostess. Inwardly she exclaimed, "Dear a.s.s!... But is he going on like this for the whole of my party?"

Up to then Captain Ross had only spoken to her and to the other young Scotsman whom he had brought with him. At Olwen he had simply glowered.

At Miss van Huysen on the other side he had not looked.

"What's Love?" he continued, still to Mrs. Cartwright. "It's an amus.e.m.e.nt. That's what it ought to be. An Episode. It's the Women who insist on spoiling it; taking it seriously. Nothing in this world is worth taking seriously; barring a man's job.... What's woman? The Plaything of Man. And what's Marriage?"

It was, as he p.r.o.nounced it, a word of one syllable.

"Marriage," he answered his own question, "is an idea that the sensible man looks at from every angle, and then cuts right out until he can't find anything better to do. If he is really a sensible man, he invariably can find it."

"Ah," uttered Mrs. Cartwright with the little appreciative laugh of one who hears for the first time an original thought brilliantly phrased.

But she wanted to be soothing; she was fond of Captain Ross. One does not sob out one's weakness on a man's shoulder once and think of him as a stranger thereafter. She had asked him to forget. She never forgot....

A pity he'd come in this absurd mood, she thought.

Her party, at her flat in Westminster, had arrived at the stage of the feast when tongues were loosed and the young guests were gossiping and chirruping in merry twos and threes.

Little Mr. Brown was beamingly loquacious in spite of the absence of his khakied _fiancee_, kept out of town that evening on late duty. Between Mr. Brown and the fresh-faced naval boy, Mr. Ellerton sat little Olwen Howel-Jones, enjoying herself without disguise and looking her very best. She was a girl who had "days"; this was one of them. Never had her glossy black hair "gone up" so well, or her face lighted up so vividly; never, against her pale skin, had her laughing mouth bloomed in such a carnation-red. Never had any dress suited her so well as that flapper's frock of succory-blue with touches of cream, and dull pink. It was the frock Mrs. Cartwright had worn once on Biscay beach; she had pressed it upon Olwen as she said good-bye at Les Pins, telling her it was a young girl's colour after all. There Olwen sat in it now, laughing and being talked to by two young men at once and looking a picture in it....

It was from this picture that Captain Ross's dark eyes looked so pertinaciously away, as with new sardonic energy he informed Mrs.

Cartwright that by the time a man had learnt to handle women he'd learnt that their place in his life was not all that important that he wanted to handle them at all.

Mrs. Cartwright pa.s.sed him the Sauterne.

"Thank goodness that there is at least enough to _drink_," she reflected with a quick whimsical glance about the well-cleared dishes on her supper-table that had held:

1. Remains of chicken, with an intolerable deal of rice and curry to a very little fowl.

2. Allotment potatoes.

3. A pound of Normandy b.u.t.ter bought that morning in Boulogne and brought over in Sergeant Tronchet's haversack.

4. Pease-pudding.

5. Beetroot....

6. Green salad.

Well, they'd seemed to enjoy what there was.

"Ah!" exclaimed Mrs. Cartwright, here catching a remark from over the table. "A penny from _you_, Mr. Brown!" And she pushed over to him a money-box with the Blue Cross upon it, known as "The Fine-box."

This claimed a penny from whomsoever entering Mrs. Cartwright's abode should make any allusion to a subject which she declared was now inadmissibly boring: namely, food. One met quite intelligent people who became hopelessly tedious about "recipes," "how they managed," and so on. Rations had to be; and catering, food-cards, and subst.i.tute foods.

But why intensify the Unspeakable by unnecessary speaking about it?

Hence this box.