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found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin He was saying to her:

"If, ma'am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd

And she had exclaimed:

"You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toe-nails And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes

"I told him," her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, "that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer

"It sounds," she said with a little shudder, "as if you were all schoolboys playing a game And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things

Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious