Dormer had not been home on leave since early spring, and the leave that he got for convalescence gave him not only some idea of the vast changes going on in England, while he, in France, had been engaged in the same old War, but a notion of changes that had gone on in that old War without his having perceived them. He was let loose from Hospital just before Christmas, at that unfortunate period when the public at home were still feeling the reaction from the Bell-ringing of Cambrai, were just learning the lengths to which the collapse of Russia had gone and were to be confronted with the probable repercussion of that collapse upon the prospects of the campaign in the West. There was no escaping these conclusions because his own home circumstances had so changed as to throw him back completely on himself. His father having died while he was in France, his mother had taken a post under one of the semi-official War organizations that abounded. The old home in which he had grown up had been dispersed, and he found his only near relative in his native town was his sister, a teacher by profession, who had moved the remnants of the old furniture and his and her own small belongings to a new house in one of the high, healthy suburbs that surrounded the old town. She was, however, busy all day, and he fell into the habit, so natural to anyone who has lived in a Mess for years, of dropping in at one of the better-class bars, before lunch, for an _apéritif_, and a glance at the papers. Here he would also pickup some one for a round of golf, which would keep him employed until tea-time, for he could not rid himself of the War-time habit of looking upon each day as something to be got through somehow, in the hopes that the morrow might be better. These ante-prandial excursions were by far the closest contact he had had with anything like a normal, representative selection of his fellow-countrymen, since they and he had become so vitally altered from the easy-going, sport-loving England of pre-War, and he had to readjust his conception considerably. He soon grasped that there was a lot of money being made, and a lot of khaki being worn as a cover for that process. There was plenty of energy, a good deal of fairly stubborn intention to go on and win, but a clear enough understanding that the War was not going to be won in the trenches. And when he had got over some little spite at this, his level habit of mind obliged him to confess that there was a good deal in it. There were many signs that those who held that view were right.