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290 to him now. But Lady Tintagel was going to do nothing of the sort: she was just going to be a housekeeper. It was very selfish of her; Archie would certainly want, from time to time, to go up to town and spend a night or two there, and now he would have to go to a hotel or a club, instead of profiting by the spacious privacy of his father's house. Charity begins at home; and his mother had started charity on most extraneous lines. Jessie had followed this lead, "the lead of so-called trumps," as Archie framed a private phrase. She would start by being not even a housekeeper, but a sort of kitchen-maid at the same hospital. She had an insane desire to work, to do something that cost her something, instead of engaging a kitchen-maid, and paying her wages to go to some hospital or other. There was a craze for "personal service," instead of getting other people to do work for you, if you felt work had to be done. People wanted to "do their bit," to employ an odious expression which was beginning to obtain currency. The nation was going to be mobilized; hand and heart had to serve some vague national idea. Occasionally, as on the night when war was declared, Archie saw an æsthetic beauty in the notion of upholding rights and liberties; but he had not then reckoned with the fact that personal inconvenience might result from that quixotic revolution. Quixotism was fine in theory, but it was a dream, not to be encouraged in waking hours, when far more important and realizable commodities, like whisky and absinthe, engaged the true attention.

But, whoever else was treacherous, his father at least was loyal, and showed no sign of becoming a butler or a footman, to correspond with his wife and Jessie. Occasionally some grave report concerning the German advance through Belgium used to reach his brain, and he would walk up and down his room in the evening with a martial tread, and a glance at a sword