Privately, he had self-criticism and tried to stifle it. There was a miasma of disillusionment everywhere; there was the Peace that was mislaid by French pawnbrokers instead of being made by gentlemen; there was the impulse to forget the war on the part of the civilian population who now seemed so brutally in possession; there was the treatment of disbanded soldiery which, this time, was to have belied history, and didn’t. He strained to believe the current dicta of the minority mind and to find in them excuse for his lethargy. He was, no doubt, tired; but whatever subtle infections of the soul might be distressing him, materially at any rate he was immune from the common aggravation of high prices. He made that explicitly one of his excuses. It wasn’t fair that he, who had all the money he needed, should take a job from a man who needed money. “There’s unpaid work,” thought Mary, but she did not say it. She thought he must sooner or later see it for himself. He did see it and tried to blink at it. He was of the Hepplestalls, of a race who weren’t acclimatized to leisure, who found happiness in setting their teeth in work. He was born with a conscience and couldn’t damp it down. He was aware, at the back of behind, that it was hurting him to turn a deaf ear to the call of Staithley. He had done worse things than Staithley implied in the necessity of war, and there was also a necessity of peace. He felt nobly moral to let such sentiments find lodgment in his mind. His father’s diffident comparison of the Hepplestalls with the Samurai came back to him. Yes, one ought to serve, but it wasn’t necessary to go to Staithley to be a Samurai. One could be a Samurai in London. He, decisively, was forced to be a Samurai in London because he had married Mary Arden and to wrench her from her vocation, to take her away from London, was unthinkable.