“The prime ministers of the allies,” proclaimed Triskett with the pomp of a toast-master, “have been meeting in discord and parting in harmony, without settling anything. The public, however, me lords, ladies _and_ gentlemen, has by now ceased to expect settlements. We have had a new policy once a week to bring Russia back into what the poet so felicitously calls ‘the comity of nations’; a protest once a fortnight against bolshevist propaganda in the far east; and winged words from the labour party once a month, when it thinks Winston has a new scheme for invading Russia. Reparations, my dear Oakleigh, are rather _vieux jeu_: we don’t remind Ll-G. of his promises to hang the kaiser or ‘make the Huns pay’; if we did, the French might try to catch us up for an invasion of the Ruhr. We’re rather short with the French since the Washington Conference. At home, you’ll find the prime minister has got a new wind, but everybody’s very sick of him. Gawd, and I’m sick of everything!,” he added with his first approach to sincerity. The bitter, neurotic voice reminded me of a night, some eight years earlier, in my old room, a quarter of a mile away in Bouverie Street. Van Arden and Jack Summertown then burst in with the announcement that they were bored beyond endurance; we must break windows or light a bonfire in Trafalgar Square. “Sick of everything!,” they repeated at short intervals. I could not join in whatever debauch they arranged: it was press-night, for one reason; and, for another—unless my memory be at fault—, this was the Thursday following the Serajevo assassinations, when universal dissatisfaction sought practical expression. Arden and Summertown were now dead; but Triskett stood in their place. And Trisketts, multiplied to infinity, furnished the atmosphere, the fuel and the spark whereby the world was periodically set ablaze. The Triskett of an earlier generation had told his friends in Paris that a bit of a revolution would at least liven things; he had urged Lafayette to fire on the mob at Versailles “just to see what would happen”. I mentioned this fancy to Bertrand and O’Rane at the end of dinner. “It’s the revolt against peace, after the incessant excitement of war,” said my uncle, who had been loudly regaled with private mutinies for the last hour. Ivy Gaymer was now in the precarious legal region “between the _nisi_ and the absolute”; Sam Dainton had scandalized his parents by opening a cocktail-bar in Swallow Street; and Barbara was contemplating a volume of autobiography. “I’m afraid we’re drifting . . .” “We’re refusing to admit there’s been a war,” Raney struck in. “You can’t expect anything to be the same; and it’s because I’m afraid to drift that I’m carrying out a new idea with this money.”