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Dastrey glanced at him with surprising kindliness. "Ah, that's good news, my dear fellow!"

"You think so?" Campton half-sneered.

"Of course—why not? What are you painting? May I come and see?"

"Naturally." Campton paused. "The fact is, I was bitten the other day with a desire to depict that little will-o'-the-wisp of a Mrs. Talkett. Come to her house any afternoon and I'll show you the thing."

"To her house?" Dastrey paused with a frown. "Then the picture's finished?"

"No—not by a long way. I'm doing it there—in her milieu, among her crowd. It amuses me; they amuse me. When will you come?" He shot out the sentences like challenges; and his friend took them up in the same tone.

"To Mrs. Talkett's—to meet her crowd? Thanks—I'm too much tied down by my job."

"No; you're not. You're too disapproving," said Campton quarrelsomely. "You think we're all a lot of shirks, of drones, of international loafers—I don't know what you call us. But I'm one of them, so whatever name you give them I must answer to. Well, I'll tell you what they are, my dear fellow—and I'm not ashamed to be among them: they're people who've resolutely, unanimously, unshakeably decided, for a certain number of hours each day, to forget the war, to ignore it, to live as if it were not and never had been, so that———"