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A
survival, too; for this world into which she had now stepped was one
quite new to her. Yet when she had first shut herself up in Lancaster
Gate she had never been conscious of any great difference between herself
and other women or girls. She had lived a very quiet life in a quiet home
before the war. Her father, a hard-working Civil Servant on a small
income, and her mother, the daughter of a Wesleyan Minister, had brought
her up strictly, yet with affection. The ways of the house were
old-fashioned, dictated by an instinctive dislike of persons who went
often to theatres and dances, of women who smoked, or played bridge, or
indulged in loud, slangy talk. Dictated, too, by a pervading "worship of
ancestors," of a preceding generation of plain evangelical men and women,
whose books survived in the little house, and whose portraits hung upon
its walls.
Then, in the first year of the war, she had married a young soldier, the
son of family friends, like-minded with her own people, a modest,
inarticulate fellow, who had been killed at Festubert.


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