“It’ll mean frightfully hard work; and getting anybody we can to help. I daresay I could rope in Norah Curfew and her gang from Bethnal Green for a start. But it’s your quick head that’s wanted, and your way with men.”

Fleur smiled. “All right,” she said.

They took the car—a present from Soames on their return from round the world—and went about, picking people up and dropping them again. They recruited Norah Curfew and ‘her gang’ in Bethnal Green; and during this first meeting of Fleur with one whom she had been inclined to suspect as something of a rival, Michael noted how, within five minutes, she had accepted Norah Curfew as too ‘good’ to be dangerous. He left them at South Square in conference over culinary details, and set forth to sap the natural opposition of officialdom. It was like cutting barbed wire on a dark night before an ‘operation.’ He cut a good deal, and went down to the ‘House.’ Humming with unformulated ‘formulas,’ it was, on the whole, the least cheerful place he had been in that day. Everyone was talking of the ‘menace to the Constitution.’ The Government’s long face was longer than ever, and nothing—they said—could be done until it had been saved. The expressions ‘Freedom of the Press’ and ‘At the pistol’s mouth,’ were being used to the point of tautology! He ran across Mr. Blythe brooding in the Lobby on the temporary decease of his beloved Weekly, and took him over to South Square ‘for a bite’ at nine o’clock. Fleur had come in for the same purpose. According to Mr. Blythe, the solution was to ‘form a group’ of right-thinking opinion.

“Exactly, Blythe! But what is right-thinking, at ‘the present time of speaking’?”

“It all comes back to Foggartism,” said Mr. Blythe.

“Oh!” said Fleur, “I do wish you’d both drop that. Nobody will have anything to say to it. You might as well ask the people of today to live like St. Francis d’Assisi.”