feather bed. And probably the girl would not take his money. She was quite right. That was the way to keep him. . . . She herself had no want of comprehension of the stimulation to be got out of parsimonious living. . . . In retreat at her convent she lay as hard and as cold as any anchorite, and rose to the nuns' matins at four.
It was not, in fact, their fittings or food that she objected to—it was that the lay-sisters, and some of the nuns, were altogether too much of the lower classes for her to like to have always about her. . . . That was why it was to the Dames Nobles that she would go, if she had to go into retreat for the rest of her life, according to contract. . . .
A gun manned by exhilarated anti-aircraft fellows, and so close that it must have been in the hotel garden, shook her physically at almost the same moment as an immense maroon popped off on the quay at the bottom of the street in which the hotel was. She was filled with annoyance at these schoolboy exercises. A tall, purple-faced, white-moustached general of the more odious type, appeared in the doorway and said that all the lights but two must be extinguished and, if they took his advice, they would go somewhere else. There were good cellars in the hotel. He loafed about the room extinguishing the lights, couples and groups passing him on the way to the door. . . . Tietjens looked up from his letter—he was now reading one of Mrs Wannop's—but seeing that Sylvia made no motion he remained sunk in his chair. . . .
The old general said:
"Don't get up, Tietjens. . . . Sit down, lieutenant. . . . Mrs Tietjens, I presume. . . . But of course I
