Another face rang a little bell in my memory. Surely that was Alfred Lyon, the Futurist painter? No, it could not be, for Lyon had dressed like an Apache, and this man was in conventional evening clothes and looked like a Brigadier in mufti. Alfred Lyon?... Yes, there he was, though he had lost his pose--cribbed from Murger’s _Vie de Bohème_--and his half-starved look, and the wildness in his eyes. As he passed Susy Whincop he spoke a few words, which I overheard. “I’ve abandoned Futurism. The present knocked that silly. Our little violence, which shocked Suburbia, was made ridiculous by the enormous thing that smashed every convention into a cocked hat.’ I’m just going to put down some war scenes--I made notes in the trenches--with that simplicity of the primitive soul to which we went back in that way of life. The soldier’s point of view, his vision, is what I shall try for.” “Splendid!” said Susy. “Only, don’t shrink from the abomination. We’ve got to make the world understand--and remember.” I felt a touch on my sleeve, and a voice said, “Hulloa!... Back again?” I turned and saw an oldish-young man, with white hair above a lean, clean-shaven face and sombre eyes. I stared, but could not fix him. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “Wetherall, of the Stage Society!” “Oh, Lord, yes!” I grasped his hand, and tried to keep the startled look out of my eyes. But he saw it, and smiled. “Four years as a prisoner of the Turk have altered me a bit. This white hair, eh? And I feel like Rip van Winkle.” He put into words something which I had been thinking since my arrival in Susy’s rooms. “We are the _revenants_, the ghosts who have come back to their old haunts. We are pretending that everything is the same as before, and that we are the same. But it’s all different, and we have changed most of all. Five years of war have dug their hoofs into the faces of most people in this crowd. Some of them look fifteen, twenty, years older, and I expect they’ve been through a century of experience and emotion.” “What’s coming out of it?” I asked. “Anything big?” “Not from us,” said Wetherall. “Most of us are finished. Our nerves have gone to pieces, and our vitality has been sapped. We shall put down a few notes of things seen and understood. But it’s the next generation that will get the big vision, or the one after next.” Then I was able to shake hands with Susy Whincop, and, as I have said, she left me in no doubt about the change that four years of war had made to me. She held me at arm’s length, studying my face. “Soul alive!” she said. “You’ve been through it all right! Hell’s branding-irons have been busy with a fair-faced man.” “As bad as that?” I asked, and she answered very gravely, “As bad as that.”