"I should say so!" smiled Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. "Why, yes!"
"But you're American! Why ever on earth should you fight?" demanded Miss Million rather shrilly. "Nothing to do with you! You aren't English; you aren't Belgium! You belong to a--what's it?--a neutral nation!"
"I guess I'm not going to let that stand in my way any," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, "if there's a chance of getting in at those hounds!"
And I saw a curious change come over my mistress's small, bonny face as she regarded this man who--under no obligation to fight--felt he could not merely look on at a struggle between Right and Might.
It was not the sentimental, girlish adoration that she had turned upon her first fancy, the Honourable Jim.
It was the look of a real woman upon the man who pleases her.
This was not the only quick change which the war made.
For instance, who would have thought that those German Jews, the Rattenheimers, would ever have had to be interned in a camp in the middle of England, away from all their friends and all their jewel-collecting pursuits?
And who would have thought that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop--I beg his pardon! I mean Flight-Lieutenant H. P. Jessop, of the Royal Flying Corps, was responsible for the prompt and uncompromising manner in which that alien couple were "dropped upon" by the authorities. Well! I should like to hope that their imprisonment was at least half as uncomfortable as that night which my mistress and I passed--thanks to them--at Vine Street police-station! But no, I suppose that's too much to expect.
Then there's the change that has been brought about by the war in my young mistress herself.
At a time when all uniform is glorious, she herself has gone back to uniform, to her old, cast-aside livery of the print frock, the small white cap, the apron of domestic service!
I gasped when I first heard what she intended to take up, namely, the position of "ward-maid" in a big London house that has been turned into a hospital for wounded officers.
"I must do something for them," she told me. "I feel I must!"
"Well, but why this particular thing?" I demurred. "If you wanted to you could take up nursing----"
"Nursin', nothing!" she retorted, in an idiom which she had borrowed from the Flight-Lieutenant. "To begin with, I've no gift that way. I know I haven't; a girl can feel that in her bones. Secondly, I ain't no training for it. I'm not one of these that imagine because it goes to their heart to see a pore fellow with a bandage round his head, well, they're a born nurse!"