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Updated: June 13, 2025
"I suppose you don't happen to know where the Lechford Committee sits?" "Never heard of it," said she with cheerful disdain. Then she smiled and he smiled. "You know, the hotel simply hums with committees, but this is the biggest by a long way. They can't let their rooms, so it costs them nothing to lend them for patriotic purposes." He liked the chit.
Thomas Lechford in his "Plain Dealing; or Newes from New England," London, 1642, says: "They are of complexion swarthy and tawny; their children are borne white, but they bedawbe them with oyle and colors presently."
To the railings was affixed a newly-painted notice: "No person will be allowed to enter these premises without a pass. To this rule there is no exception." Lechford House had been "taken over" in its entirety by a Government department that believed in the virtue of mystery and of long hours. He looked up at the higher windows. He could not distinguish the chimney amid the newly-revealed stars.
G.J., mystified, caught the grey eye of a youngish woman with a tired and fretful expression. "And you?" she inquired perfunctorily. He demanded, with hesitation: "Is this the Lechford Committee?" "The what Committee?" "The Lechford Committee headquarters." He thought she might be rather an attractive little thing at, say, an evening party.
She went to the vast Regency desk, idly fingering papers, and laid hold of a document. It was his report on the accountacy of the Lechford Hospitals in France. She scrutinised it carefully, murmuring sentences from it aloud in her French accent.
"I shall be leaving the hotel in about an hour; I'll take them away myself then," he said, and inquired for the headquarters of the Lechford French Hospitals Committee. "Committee?" repeated the girl vaguely. "I expect the Onyx Hall's what you want." She pointed up a corridor, and gave change.
The assembly had a further and particular reason for serious pride. It was getting on with the war, and in a most novel way. Private views are customarily views gratis. But the entry to this private view cost a guinea, and there was absolutely no free list. The guineas were going to the support of the Lechford Hospitals in France.
Further, the frequenting of such a house as Lechford House was more proof of his social importance, and incidentally of his riches. The spectacle of his flat showed her long ago that previously she had been underestimating his situation in the world. The revelations as to Lechford House had seemed to show her that she was still underestimating it. She resented his modesty.
La mère Gaston was the widow of a French soldier, domiciled in London previous to the war, who had died of wounds in one of the Lechford hospitals; and it was through the Lechford Committee that Gilbert had come across her. A few weeks earlier than the beginning of the formal liaison Mrs. Braiding had fallen ill for a space, and Madame Gaston had been summoned as charwoman to aid Mrs.
And he never admired her more poignantly than at the periods just before his children were born, when she had the vast, exquisitely swelling figure of the French Renaissance Virgin in marble that stood on a console in his drawing-room at the Albany.... Such was G.J.'s dream as he assisted in the control of the Lechford Hospitals. Emerging from it he looked along the table.
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