Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman
deliberate—this policy of starvation—, but I was strongly reminded of very similar treatment from a certain general in the War Office . . . who shall be nameless. You remember my difficulty about Will’s commission; he was on fire, of course, to go into the infantry. “Do you,” I asked him, “think you are serving your country by spending one day in the trenches and six months in hospital with rheumatic fever?” And, when I had wasted argument and entreaty on him, I carried my appeal to Cæsar. On the staff my boy would have been worth his weight in gold; anything else was simply a short cut to hospital. I told this general . . . when at last I contrived to see him; and his method of receiving me was to keep me standing — not a chair to be seen in the room!—with all the windows open, a gale blowing and no fire. I made him see reason at the end, but I was in bed for a week afterwards. . . I wondered whether Sir Appleton was trying to starve me into submission. . .
His plan. . . I wish you could have heard it in his own words! The impudence and brutality. . .
“If you’ve no money yourself, Lady Ann,” he said, “you’ve rich relations. Lord Brackenbury, I am sure, would give a substantial sum
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