But the nice boy had never lived and never would live with anybody on such terms, and his clear young voice lacked the plangent irony of the battered idealist. It was perfectly obvious that he was entirely ignorant of the formidable distortion of character which living with people brought about. He evidently imagined marriage was a good joke and living with girls a bad joke. Mr. Spokesly would lie on his huge bed and try to get his bearings while his neighbour gave his version of "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and "I'd Wait Till the End of the World for You." He was visible sometimes, on his balcony overlooking the steep Via Sant' Lucia raising his eyes with a charming and entirely idiotic diffidence to other balconies where leaned dark-browed damsels, and dreaming the bright and honourable dreams of the well-brought-up young Englishman. Mr. Spokesly got no assistance from such as he. Even in his most fatuous moments he had known that for them the war was only an unusually gigantic and bloody football match, for which they claimed the right to establish the rules. When it was over we would all go back to our places in the world and touch our hats to them, the landed gentry of mankind. Sitting on his park-seat, under the shadow of Victoria's triumphal arch, Mr. Spokesly saw this would not be the case. Behind his own particular problem, which was to regain, somehow or other, the taste of life, he saw something else looming. How were these very charming and delightful beings, the survivors of an age of gentles and simples, of squires and serfs, to be aroused to the fact that they were no longer accepted as the heirs of all the ages? How to make them see the millions of people of alien races moving slowly, like huge masses of rotting putrescence, to a new life? Indeed, they were very fond of using those words "rotten" and "putrid" for alien things they did not like. He felt sure they would apply both to Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, and those men he met at the Consulate. And with a twinge he reflected they might say the same thing about Evanthia, if they knew it all. Yet they must be made to know, those of them who were left, that the game was up for the cheerful schoolboy with no ascertainable ideas. The very vitality of these alien races was enough to sound a warning. "After all," Mr. Marsh had said in his throaty way, "you can't beat that type, you know." And the question looming up in the back of Mr. Spokesly's mind, as he sat on that seat in St. James's Park, was: "Couldn't you?" He discovered with a shock that his friend the elderly lieutenant, who had been visiting the Admiralty that morning and so had met Mr. Spokesly, was explaining something: "I told him that taking everything into consideration, I really couldn't see my way. Not now. You see, we aren't getting any younger, and my wife is so attached to Chingford she won't hear of leaving. And of course I couldn't go out _there_ alone now."