“If you’re going to be the safe, middle party,” I interrupted, “go all-out for that. In 1918 you had no policy; you have no living policy now. The only thing you’ve learnt since 1914 is that you have a score to settle with the coalition-liberals. While you’re settling that, the country will look for a government that will tackle unemployment before the unemployed get out of hand, a government that doesn’t bring us as near war as we are to-night.” We argued inconclusively until the theatres emptied. As there was still no sign of Saltash, I judged that—in his favourite phrase—he must be troubling the waters to some purpose; and I was preparing to leave when Sam Dainton hurried up to demand why I had not yet patronized his cocktail-bar. He was followed—at an interval of time and space calculated to disarm the king’s proctor—by Ivy Gaymer, who told me that she expected her decree to be made absolute the following week. “These six months have been hell,” she cried viciously, as she danced away with Sam. Marking her difference of outlook and appearance since she first sought from me an introduction to journalism, I felt that we were threatened by a worse spirit than that of 1914 and that we stood in need of harder moral training. Ivy’s reputation was hanging by a thread; her fingers and Sam Dainton’s were itching equally to snap it. “A mad world,” I said, as I parted from Jellaby. “A mad world,” I repeated, two days later, when I went north to bring Barbara home. “A mad world face to face with its madness,” I thought to myself, on reading an announcement, sandwiched between news of now greater moment, that Mr. David O’Rane was withdrawing the funds of the Lancing Trust from England. On reaching Seymour Street I found a telephone-message from Sonia, begging me to see her at once. I replied that I would come; but, as I walked to Westminster that afternoon, I felt—as in the similar atmosphere of eight years before—that the individual had shrunk in importance. Barbara, shaken out of her usual aloofness, now only cared to know what chance of life I would give her brother; and, though I felt for Sonia as I should feel for a popular actress who married a country curate, I was mildly aggrieved that she should absorb my time when I wanted to explore the last frantic hopes of peace.