For the moment, no doubt, war has gone out of fashion; it pines in the shade, like the old horsehair covers for sofas, or antimacassars of lace. Hardly a day can pass, even now, but someone finds out, with a start and a look of displeasure, that war has been given its chance and has not done quite so well as it ought to have done. One man will write to the Press, in dismay, that the meals in the Simplon express are not what they were in 1910. Another, outward bound by Calais to Cannes, has found that the hot-water plant in his sleeping-compartment struck work--and that in a specially cold sector down by the Alps. Thus does war in the end, knock at the doors of us all: like the roll of the earth upon its axis, it brings us, if not death or destitution or some ashy taste in the mouth, at any rate a sense of a fallen temperature in our bunks. However non-porous our minds, there does slowly filter into us the thought that when a million of a country's men of working age have just been killed there may be a plaguey dearth of the man-power needed to keep in pleasant order the lavatories of its _trains de luxe_. Sad to think how many tender minds, formed in those Elysian years--Elysian for anyone who was not poor--before the war, will have to suffer, probably for many years, these little shocks of realization. Surely there never was any time in the life of the world when it was so good, in the way of obvious material comfort, to be alive and fairly well-to-do as it was before the war. Think of the speed and comfort and relative cheapness of the Orient Express; of the way you could wander, unruined, through long æsthetic holidays in Italy and semi-æsthetic, semi-athletic holidays in the Alps; of the week-end accessibility of London from Northern England; of the accessibility of public schools for the sons of the average parson or doctor; of the penny post, crown of our civilization--torn from us while the abhorred half-penny post for circulars was yet left; of the Income Tax just large enough to give us a pleasant sense of grievance patriotically borne, but not to prostrate us, winter and summer, with two "elbow jolts" or "Mary Ann punches" like those of the perfected modern prize-fighter.