At first Lady Brand and her daughter maintained a chilly silence towards Elsa, at breakfast, luncheon, and other meals, talking to each other brightly, as though she did not exist, and referring constantly to Wickham as "poor Wicky." Ethel had a habit of reading out morsels from the penny illustrated papers, and often they referred to "another trick of the Huns" or "fresh revelations of Hun treachery." At these times Sir Amyas Brand said "Ah!" in a portentous voice, but, privately, with some consciousness of decency, begged Ethel to desist from "controversial topics." She "desisted" in the presence of her brother, whose violence of speech scared her into silence.
A later phase of Ethel's hostility to Elsa was in the style of amiable enquiry. In a simple, child-like way, as though eager for knowledge, she would ask Elsa such questions as "Why the Germans boiled down their dead?" "Why they crucified Canadian prisoners?" "Was it true that German school-children sang the Hymn of Hate before morning lessons?" "Was it by order of the Kaiser that English prisoners were starved to death?"
Elsa answered all these questions by passionate denials. It was a terrible falsehood, she said, that the Germans had boiled down bodies for fats. On the contrary, they paid the greatest reverence to their dead, as her brother had seen in many cemeteries on the Western front. The story of the "crucified Canadians" had been disproved by the English Intelligence officers after a special enquiry, as Wickham had told her. She had never heard the Hymn of Hate. Some of the English prisoners had been harshly treated—there were brutal commandants—but not deliberately starved. Not starved more than German soldiers, who had very little food during the last years of the war.
"But surely," said Lady Brand, "you must admit, my
