The discussion, like so many in these inconclusive months, ended with the evaporating discovery that we were all late for a meal. I drove to the O’Ranes’ house in Westminster with the now familiar feeling that we should waste our strength and temper until some force more potent than our mild and scholarly articles came to rouse the country out of its drunken sleep. My uncle reminded me that we had been through one period of incredulous apathy for half-a-dozen years before 1914. Then the only people to think a war possible were the militarists who, with the best intentions, precipitated it with their preparations and their talk of “inevitability”; the Disarmament League alone tried to make it impossible, as duelling was made impossible, by taking away the privilege and the means of private vengeance. What we had done then we must do now. “But in 1919,” I said, as we parted, “I am older and more easily discouraged than I was in 1909.” Barbara had come up from Crawleigh Abbey to make the acquaintance of Sonia’s new baby; and, as I strolled up and down the long library with O’Rane, I asked him how he enjoyed being the richest commoner in England. “I can’t say I’ve noticed any difference,” he laughed, “except in the number of people who think they’ve a right to be supported by some one else.” “And the millennium?,” I pursued in a fair imitation of Hornbeck. “The civic conscience? Man’s natural right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?” “What would you do in my place?,” he asked. “I’m almost certain to follow your advice.” As he spoke without irony, we beguiled the first part of luncheon with the sort of conversation that is affected by somnolent house-parties on wet afternoons. As at Cannes, each of us spent his money in dizzy flights of imagination; but now he brought us to earth with the criticism that we were not spending “for the good of humanity”. “Which was Stornaway’s condition,” he reminded me. And, in O’Rane’s hands, it was a condition that we could not fulfil. When Barbara spoke of the incurable cripples left by the war, he enquired why humanity should be relieved of its obligations. When I talked, as so often before I had talked with Deryk Lancing, of universities and institutions for research, of libraries and museums, of travelling fellowships and exploration funds, of subsidized opera and national newspapers, of model cities and a country made perfect, he applauded my enthusiasm and asked what I was doing to give it effect. “I do my modest share,” I said. “And, if I take that responsibility off your shoulders, you’ll only have more money to . . . _waste_ on yourself.”