When Elizabeth decided, somewhere towards the end of 1914, that the time had come when the principles of Freedom must be put into practice in the case of herself and Reggie, and duly informed George, he acquiesced at once. Perhaps he was so sick at heart that he was indifferent; perhaps he was only loyally carrying out the agreement. What surprised me was that he did not take that opportunity of telling her about Fanny. But he was apparently quite convinced that she knew. It was, therefore, an additional shock when he found out that she didn’t know, and a still greater shock to see how she behaved. He suffered an obnubilation of the intellect in dealing with women. He idealized them too much. When I told him with a certain amount of bitterness that Fanny was probably a trollop who talked “freedom” as an excuse and that Elizabeth was probably a conventional-minded woman who talked “freedom” as in the former generation she would have talked Ruskin and Morris politico-æstheticism, he simply got angry. He said I was a fool. He said the War had induced in me a peculiar resentment against women—which was probably true. He said I did not understand either Elizabeth or Fanny—how could I possibly understand two people I had never seen and have the cheek to try to explain them to _him_, who knew them so well? He said I was far too downright, over-simplified and _tranchant_ in my judgments, and that I didn’t—probably couldn’t—understand the finer complexities of peoples’ psychology. He said a great deal more, which I have forgotten. But we came as near to a quarrel as two lonely men could, when they knew they had no other companion. This was in the Officers’ Training Camp in 1917, when George was already in a peculiar and exacerbated state of nerves. After that, I made no effort at any sort of ruthless directness, but just allowed him to go on talking. There was nothing else to do. He was living in a sort of double nightmare—the nightmare of the War and the nightmare of his own life. Each seemed inextricably interwoven. His personal life became intolerable because of the War, and the War became intolerable because of his own life. The strain imposed on him—or which he imposed on himself—must have been terrific. A sort of pride kept him silent. Once when it was my turn to act as commander of the other Cadets, I was taking them in Company Drill. George was right-hand man in the front rank of number one Platoon, and I glanced at him to see that he was keeping direction properly. I was startled by the expression on his face—so hard, so fixed, so despairing, so defiantly agonized. At mess we ate at tables in sixes—he hardly ever spoke except to utter some banality in an effort to be amiable or some veiled sarcasm which sped harmlessly over the heads of those for whom it was intended. He sneered a little too openly at the coarse obscene talk about tarts and square-pushing, and was too obviously revolted by water-closet wit. However, he wasn’t openly disliked.