And Eddy, looking round the room at all of them, thought how well they all got on for one evening, because they were wanting to, and because one evening did not matter, and how they would not, many of them, get on at all, and would not even want to, if they were put to a longer test. And once again, at this, that he told himself was not the last, gathering of the heterogeneous crowd of his friends together, he saw how right they all were, in their different ways and yet at odds. He remembered how someone had said, “The interesting quarrels of the world are never between truth and falsehood, but between different truths.” Ah, but must there be quarrels? More and more clearly he had come to see lately that there must; that through the fighting of extremes something is beaten out.... Someone thumped the table for silence, and Billy Raymond was on his feet, proposing their host’s health and happiness. Billy was rather a charming speaker, in his unselfconscious, unfluent, amused, quietly allusive way, that was rather talk than speechifying. After him came Nevill Bellairs, Eddy’s brother-in-law to be, who said the right things in his pleasant, cordial, well-bred, young member’s manner. Then they drank Eddy’s health, and after that Eddy got on to his feet to return thanks. But all he said was “Thanks very much. It was very nice of all of you to come. I hope you’ve all enjoyed this evening as much as I have, and I hope we shall have many more like it in future, after....” When he paused someone broke in with “He’s a jolly good fellow,” and they shouted it till the passers by in the Soho streets took it up and sang and whistled in chorus. That was the answer they unanimously gave to the hope he had expressed. It was an answer so cheerful and so friendly that it covered the fact that no one had echoed the hope, or even admitted it as a possibility. After all, it was an absurd thing to hope, for one dinner-party never is exactly like another; how should it be, with so much of life and death between?