“I call that mocking a feller’s misfortunes,” replied my cousin with dignity. “I’ve a good mind not to tell you now.” . . . As we said nothing, Laurence pulled his chair close to mine and helped me to a glass of my own madeira. “These devastated areas, George: they’ll need the hell of a lot of building material. If you’ve any capital lying idle . . .” “My trustees see to it that I haven’t,” I answered. “Ready money’s gone out of circulation since the millennium,” explained Hornbeck; and for once I almost agreed with him. In these months I was indeed reminded of the embarrassing first days of hostilities, before the Treasury began to issue its own notes. Houses, land, stock-in-trade were visible and tangible; we could have rubbed along somehow under a general system of barter; but no one seemed to be blessed with cash. The owners of big fortunes made in the war, so useful a year earlier in buying unmanageable estates, disappeared as suddenly as they had emerged: a few, I fancy, were frightened by talk of a retrospective levy on their profits, but most of them derived their wealth from industry; and industry at this time was being attacked by creeping paralysis. Sir John Woburn’s group of papers set up a cry for economy; the ‘coupon’ system of electioneering was thrown into its first practical discredit by the success of independent ‘anti-waste’ candidates; and, when my political barometer told me that all this talk of ‘reconstruction’ was well enough, but that we must reconstruct the whole of Europe, I felt that the logic of facts had done what the pleadings of _Peace_ would never do. At my own table, though I had achieved an ingenious double revenge by placing Dainton, who feared my uncle, within earshot of my uncle, who despised Dainton, I did not feel justified in pointing political morals; and it was with outward cordiality that I listened to his diagnosis and treatment of international prostration. “The _whole_ of Europe,” he repeated. “No good tinkering. Take Germany. Take Austria. _Take Russia._”