Michael (gloomily). "Mummy, I do hope I shan't die soon."
Mummy. "Darling! So do I—but why?"
Michael. "It would be too awful to die a civilian."
We were sitting in a little restaurant in the gay city—which is not a gay city any more, but a city of dejection, a city that knows there is a war going on and not so long since could hear the guns. There are, however, corners where, for the moment, contentment or, at any rate, visitations of mirth are possible, and this little restaurant is one of them. Well, we were sitting there waiting for coffee, the room (for it was late) now empty save for the table behind me, where two elderly French bourgeois and a middle-aged woman were seated, when suddenly the occupant of the chair which backed into mine and had been backing into it so often during the evening that I had punctuated my eating with comments on other people's clumsy bulkiness; suddenly, as I say, this occupant, turning completely round, forced his face against mine and, cigarette in hand, asked me for a light. I could see nothing but face—a waste of plump ruddy face set deep between vast shoulders, a face garnished with grey beard and moustache, and sparkling moist eyes behind highly magnifying spectacles. Very few teeth and no hair. But the countenance as a whole radiated benignance and enthusiasm; and one thing, at any rate, was clear, and that was that none of my resentment as to the restlessness of the chair had been telepathed.
Would I do him the honour of giving him a light? he asked, the face so close to mine that we were practically touching. I reached out for a match. Oh, no, he said, not at all; he desired the privilege of taking the light from my cigarette, because I was an Englishman and it was an honour to meet me, and—and— "Vive l'Angleterre!" This was all very strange and disturbing to me; but we live in stirring times, and nothing ever will be the same again. So I gave him the light quite calmly and with great presence of mind said, "Vive la France!" Then he grasped my hand and thanked me for the presence of the English army in his country, the credit for which I endeavoured fruitlessly to disclaim, and we all stood up and bowed to each other severally and collectively, and resumed our own lives again.
But the incident had been so unexpected that I, at any rate, could not be quite normal just yet, for I could not understand why, out of four of us, all English, and one a member of the other sex, so magnetic to Frenchmen, I should have been selected either as the most typical or the most likely to be cordial—I who only a week or so ago was told reflectively by a student of men, gazing steadfastly upon me, that my destiny must be to be more amused by other people than to amuse them. Especially, too, as earlier in the evening there had been two of our men—real men—in khaki in the room. Yet there it was: I, a dreary civilian, had been carefully selected as the truest representative of Angleterre and all its bravery and chivalry, even to the risk of dislocation of the perilously short neck of the speaker.
It was therefore my turn to behave, and I whispered to the waiter to fill
