was a composition of Catherine of Russia, Lucrezia Borgia, Mme. de Brinvilliers, Moll Flanders, a _tricoteuse_ and a hissing villainness from the Surrey side. But George only lasted his mother as a source of posthumous excitement for about two months. Just as the quarrel with Elizabeth reached stupendous heights of vulgar invective (on her side), old Winterbourne got himself run over. So there was the excitement of the inquest and a real funeral, and widow’s weeds and more tear-blotched letters. She even sent a tear-blotched letter to Elizabeth, which I saw, saying that “twenty years”—it was really almost thirty—“of happy married life were over, both father and son were now happily united, and, whatever Mr. Winterbourne’s faults, he was a _gentleman_.” (Heavily underlined and followed by several exclamation marks, the insinuation being apparently that Elizabeth was no lady.) A month later Mrs. Winterbourne married the sheik—alas, no sheik now—at a London registry office, whence they departed to Australia to live a clean sportin’ life. Peace be with them both—they were too clean and sportin’ for a corrupt and unclean Europe. George’s parents, of course, were grotesques. When, in a mood of cynical merriment, he used to tell his friends the exact truth about his parents, he was always accused—even by quite intelligent people—of creating a monstrous legend. Unless all the accepted ideas about heredity and environment are false—which they probably are—it is a regular mystery of Udolpho how George managed to be so different from his parents and the family milieu. Physically he looked like them both—in every other respect he might have dropped from the moon for all the resemblance he had to them. Perhaps they seemed so grotesque because neither of them could adjust to the tremendous revolution in everything, of which the war was a cause or symptom. The whole immense drama went on in front of their noses, and they never perceived it. They only worried about their rations. Old Winterbourne also worried a good deal about “the country,” and wrote letters of advice to the _Times_ (which didn’t publish them) and then rewrote them on Club notepaper to the Prime Minister. They were invariably politely acknowledged by a secretary. But Mrs. Winterbourne only cared spasmodically about “the country.” Her view of the British Empire was that it should continue the war as a holy crusade for the extermination of all “filthy, vile foreigners,” making the world safe for straight, clean sheiks and pure, sweet, kittenish English women of fifty. Grotesques indeed, fanciful, unbelievable, like men’s fashions of 1840. To me, who only saw them a few times, either in company with George or as his executor, they seemed as fantastic, as ridiculous, as prehistoric as the returning _émigrés_ seemed to Paris in 1815. Like the Bourbons, the elder Winterbournes learned nothing from the war, and forgot nothing. It is the tragedy of England that the war has taught