Kitty

Mrs. St. George looked out into Cardigan Square. The high,
Georgian window framed a picture that was seen in winter and in
spring, in autumn and in summer, and so familiar had it become to
her that it seemed to possess no more than a casual significance.
But on this April day, in the year nineteen hundred and eighteen,
Mrs. St. George saw the square like a face strange with sudden
emotion, or a landscape sad with the young greenness of a wintry
spring. Standing in the middle of the room she saw this strip
framed by the window, the familiar details, the gradations of the
vista, the wood-paved roadway touching the kerb of the flagged
path, the black railings of the garden, the young green of
sprouting lilacs and privets, the kind of blue-grey gloom hanging
in the sooty shrubberies, the thin green of the London grass, the
maculated trunks of the old plane-trees, the spread of their tops,
the vague redness of the houses beyond, and above it all a square
panel of sky. On this April day a south-west wind moved the
branches of the plane-trees; sudden sunshine was followed by sudden
shadow; the wet trees would glisten or grow black.

"Abominable!"

She uttered the word aloud, and it was a strange word for so cold
and so self-contained a woman to utter. She had been standing
there for quite five minutes, holding a letter that had changed the
familiar sameness of her outlook upon this London square. She was
a tall woman, handsome, fiftyish or more, with one of those firm
white faces, and lips that close decisively over very regular
teeth. Someone had once called her an Arctic Juno. Her wavy, fair
hair had a fallacious softness. Her eyes were very blue.

In a corner, on the right of one of the windows, stood a big
bureau, mahogany, capacious and solid. Clara St. George was a
woman of affairs, and all her multifarious letters and papers were
kept under perfect control. With a deliberate and yet sudden
movement she approached her desk, placed her son's letter on the
writing-pad, and glanced at a card upon which various telephone
numbers were neatly recorded. The telephone was attached to the
wall beside her desk. She rang up the exchange. There was
something characteristic of her in the way in which she put out a
hand and took down the receiver. The gesture was possessive.
Always and firmly she had grasped the desired object and uttered
decisively the word "mine."

"Exchange--are you there? Give me 10097."

She waited. Her blue eyes looked out at the sudden sunlight in the
tops of the plane-trees. She stood very still. Never yet had she
allowed her body or her emotions to be hurried.

Her eyes grew more hard and attentive.

"Hallo--! Is that Sir Murray Hurder's? Yes. O, it is you, Sir
Murray. Mrs. St. George speaking. I have just heard that they are
sending my son out to the front. What? Yes, to France. It's
disgraceful. They have passed him as fit. You have known him
since he was ten--"

She paused and stood listening, lips pressed to a pale hardness.

"Shocked--? Naturally. It's abominable. What, nothing can be
done? Yes, of course, I understand--This brutal business--"