A life, they say, may be considered as a point of light which suddenly appears from nowhere, out of the blue. The point describes a luminous geometrical figure in space-time; and then just as suddenly disappears. (Interesting to have seen the lights disappearing from Space-Time during one of the big battles—Death dowses the glims.) Well, it happens to us all; but our vanity is interested by the hope that the rather tangled and not very luminous track we made will continue to shine for a few people for a few years. I suppose Winterbourne’s name does appear on some War Memorial, probably in the Chapel of his Public School; and, of course, he’s got his neat ration of headstone in France. But that’s about all. Nobody much minded that he was killed. Unassertive people with no money have few friends; and Winterbourne hadn’t counted much on his scanty flock, least of all on me. But I know—because he told me himself—that he had rather relied on four people to take some interest in him and his fate. They were his father and mother, his wife and his mistress. If he had known what actually occurred with these four at the news of his death I think he would have been a little shocked, as well as heartily amused and perhaps a bit relieved. It would have freed him from certain feelings of responsibility. * * * * * Winterbourne’s father, whom I knew slightly, was an inadequate sentimentalist. Mild, with an affectation of gentility, incompetent, selfishly unselfish (i.e., always patting himself on the back for “renouncing” something he was afraid to do or be or take), he had a genius for messing up other people’s lives. The amount of irreparable harm which can be done by a really “good” man is astounding. Ten astute rogues do less. Old Winterbourne messed up his wife’s life by being weak with her; messed up his children’s lives by being weak and sentimentalish with them and by losing his money—the unforgivable sin in a parent; messed up the lives of his friends and clients by honestly losing their money for them; and messed up his own most completely. That was the one thing he ever did with complete and satisfactory thoroughness. The mess he got his life into would have baffled an army of psychologists to unravel.