Because Bertrand made no effort to detain me, I stayed in London—sullenly protesting that we only bored the converted and exasperated the inconvertible—till the end of the year. Looking back, I suppose the autumn brought with it the first signs of returning reason, though Sir Roger Dainton—more in sorrow than anger—burnt the _Economic Consequences_ and left me—with anger and sorrow nicely balanced—to buy myself another copy. It was one thing, however, to concede that the peace terms were unworkable; it was something quite different to precipitate a general election in the hope of mending them. The coalition survived the Paisley election, when Mr. Asquith was drawn to Westminster through an avenue of cheering crowds; it survived the awkward questions which the average voter was beginning to frame. And, so long as it steered clear of another war, it could disregard the academic questions of sentimental leader-writers who asked if any one was a penny the better for war and victory. “You’ve had a year to get your new heaven and earth into working order,” said Philip Hornbeck, when I visited him at the Admiralty on the anniversary of the armistice. “I’ve been tied here so much that I’ve entirely lost track of the millennium. It’s arrived, I suppose?” “A number of people haven’t heard of it yet,” I answered, with my thoughts on the filibustering expeditions of the last three months. D’Annunzio had revived memories of Garibaldi by seizing Fiume and defying the great powers to turn him out; admirals and generals of the old _régime_ in Russia were being supplied by amateur strategists in England with arms to crush a revolutionary government in a country that had never been successfully invaded since the coming of the Tartars. “If the allies had an agreed policy . . .” “You can’t have an agreed policy when you’re not on speaking-terms with a single one of your neighbours,” Hornbeck retorted. “I invited your friend Lucien de Grammont . . .” “He won’t come if he knows I’m here,” I interrupted. “And I don’t know that I’m very keen to meet French people at present.” It was twelve months, to a minute, since Violet Loring pointed out to her boy the men who had come from Rhodesia and Japan, Portugal and Vancouver to die in a common cause. “I offered van Oss as a bait,” said Hornbeck with a grin. “If you three high-minded idealists can’t make a millennium, you mustn’t get impatient with the rank-and-file.” It was a matter for congratulation that a party so rashly collected could meet and scatter without a scene of violence. Clifford expected, quite obviously, to be castigated because America would not sign the covenant of the League; Lucien, no less obviously, looked only for a chance of castigating me because I criticized the treaty in every issue of _Peace_. “I don’t quite know what we’re celebrating,” he muttered provocatively, with a morose eye on the gathering crowds in Whitehall. “The loss of the war?”