“If you’d been a properly-minded hostess you would have proposed that long ago. I’ve been waiting anxiously for it, only there is Ursula absorbed in that outfit that no masculine infant anywhere would recognise——”
“Oh, I’ve given up the knicker idea long ago,” interrupted Ursula. “I’ve turned them into chest-protectors for the old people in the infirmary. And now, as a war economy, I’m going to enlarge your vests (I neither ask for, nor expect, gratitude!). The laundry having shrunk them to waistbands, I shall add an upper and a lower storey.”
“—and _you_ sit hour after hour reading MSS. What are they all about? What’s that one in your hand, for instance?”
“This one,” holding up some sheets of violently-written paper that almost burst through the envelope, “is an anonymous letter from some irate lady who objects to something or someone appearing in our pages. I haven’t time to read it, but if you care to wade through it——”
“Anything but,” I told her. “It is always a pleasant thing, at the end of the day, to feel that you have, even in a slight way, contributed to anyone’s happiness. And I’m sure the lady who dug her pen into that anonymous letter was very happy when she posted it. Glad am I, therefore, to be the unworthy instrument permitted to promote her joy!”
Virginia merely snorted. “What’s the next MS. about?”
“This is a very long poem on the War, and the writer explains that she has made all the lines run straight on in order to save paper, but doubtless I can find out where it rhymes. It begins ‘Hail, proud mother of nations who dwell in these sea-girt islands for centuries past and centuries yet to be——’”
Virginia said she’d skip the rest, please, and wasn’t there a little light fiction anywhere in the chaos before me?
“This is a story of a beautiful Russian princess who was doomed to live in a lonely castle, with no one but her aged and decrepit nurse, in the very centre of a pathless Siberian forest, hundreds of miles from everybody, until the spell should be broken——”
“(I don’t know—the writer doesn’t say)—until the spell should be broken, when she would be free. She was the most exquisite vision that ever burst upon human sight. Not only were her features perfect, and her hair a rippling cascade of gold, but her dress was grace and beauty combined.”