ing Jew swimming up through his carefully arranged Gentile features. He couldn't shoot as well as Tietjens, or ride, or play a hand at auction. Why, damn it, he, Tietjens, hadn't the least doubt that he could paint better water-colour-pictures. . . . And, as for returns . . . he would undertake to tear the guts out of half a dozen new and contradictory A.C.I.'s—Army Council Instructions—and write twelve correct Command Orders founded on them, before Levin had lisped out the date and serial number of the first one. . . . He had done it several times up in the room, arranged like a French blue-stocking's salon, where Levin worked at Garrison headquarters . . . He had written Levin's blessed command order while Levin fussed and fumed about their being delayed for tea with Mlle de Bailly . . . and curled his delicate moustache . . . Mlle de Bailly, chaperoned by old Lady Sachse, had tea by a clear wood fire in an eighteenth-century octagonal room, with blue-grey tapestried walls and powdering closets, out of priceless porcelain cups without handles. Pale tea that tasted faintly of cinnamon!
Mlle de Bailly was a long, dark high-coloured Provençale. Not heavy, but precisely long, slow, and cruel; coiled in a deep arm-chair, saying the most wounding, slow things to Levin, she resembled a white Persian cat luxuriating, sticking out a tentative pawful of expanding claws. With eyes slanting pronouncedly upwards and a very thin hooked nose . . . almost Japanese . . . And with a terrific cortège of relatives, swell in a French way. One brother a chauffeur to a Marshal of France . . . An aristocratic way of shirking!
With all that, obviously even off parade, you might well be the social equal of a Staff colonel: but you jolly well had to keep from showing that you were his
