away from Evelyn, just after our marriage. . . . Imagine the situation. A kid of a girl, wanting to be merry and bright, eager for the fun of life and all that, left alone in a big old house in the country, or when she got fed up with that, in a big gloomy house in town. She got fed up with both pretty quick. I used to get letters from her—every day for a while—and she used to say in every one of them, 'I'm fed up like Billy-O.' That was her way of putting it, don't you know, and I got scared. But what could I do—out there—except write and tell her to try and get busy with something? Well, she got busy all right!"
Harding laughed again in his woful way, which was not good to hear. Then he became angry and passionate, and told me it was all the fault of "those damned women."
I asked him what "damned women," and he launched into a wild denunciation of a certain set of women—most of the names he mentioned were familiar to me from full-length portraits in the Sketch and Tatler—who had spent the years of war in organising fancy bazaars, charity matinées, private theatricals for Red Cross funds—"and all that," as Harding remarked in his familiar phrase. He said they were rotten all through, utterly immoral, perfectly callous of all the death and tragedy about them, except in a false, hysterical way at times.
"They were ghouls," he said.
Many of them had married twice, three times, even more than that, before the boys who were killed were cold in their graves. Yet those were the best, with a certain respect for convention. Others had just let themselves go. They had played the devil with any fellow who came within their circle of enticement, if he
