“One swallow may not make a summer,” said my cousin Laurence, when his long-suffering sister banished him from Loring House to the admittedly inferior amenities of Seymour Street; “but one duchess is going to make a season. Eleanor Ross has decided that London is again to be the metropolis of England.” “For that,” I said, “you must blame the prime minister. It’s one thing for her to keep open restaurant in Paris, it’s quite another to play round-the-world-in-eighty-days with an international conference. San Remo, Hythe . . .” In a few months I might have added Boulogne, Brussels and Spa, so swiftly did one final settlement follow on another. The hangers-on, meanwhile, had abandoned the pursuit and returned to London. A season, of some kind, was opening; and poor Barbara was giving the first of those “wonderful parties” which were to make her forget our recent tragedy. “Any one who ever had any money seems to have spent it,” said Laurence with irrelevant regret and an appraising glance round the table. “I suppose _you_ don’t know of a decent job? Something with a bit more money and a bit less work than the bar?” If I had, I told him, I could have filled the position fifty times over with the men who were being thrown on to the labour-market as the last regiments returned home and the last war-departments were dismantled. I hesitate to say how many men like my brother-in-law Gervaise I helped into lucrative billets in the first six months of peace; I can say without hesitation that in 1920 I looked vainly for a single position that I could recommend to the pathetic, unspecialized men and boys who sent me testimonials beginning: “_Public school and university ex-service officer_, 1914-1918, _wounded_.” . . . If others received half the appeals that came to me, the city was packed close with them; and the only man of my acquaintance who benefited by this congestion was the enterprising Sam Dainton, who expanded his agency-business into a colourable imitation of highway-robbery by making a corner in empty houses. The premiums which he imposed and the commissions which he accepted light-heartedly from vendor and purchaser would probably have landed him in the dock if he had remained longer in this kind of business; but vaulting ambition tempted him to compete with more experienced brigands in buying surplus stores from the government, and the blackmail which he levied on the homeless may have been balanced, with poetic justice, on the day when makeshift houses were erected below cost-price from the forced sale of his unmarketable stocks. “Nobody could want _less_ work than you do at the bar,” Philip Hornbeck pointed out.