The days that followed my uncle’s death stand out in my memory as a vivid and wholly disconnected dream between two normal periods of waking-life. At one moment I was living in the midst of vast, conflicting noises; there followed complete calm, during which I was indeed as busy as ever—as busy as one seems to be in a dream—; then the tumult broke out afresh. Though nothing had in fact been suspended, though nothing had greatly progressed in my short spell of unconsciousness, I felt at the time that I had two personalities, one on either bank of the dividing stream. 2 I believe Bertrand’s death saved my life or at least my reason. I remember feeling almost bitterly that I could not support his illness in addition to my work for our paper, the hourly exasperation of my life at home and the storm of calamities that were bursting on us from the four corners of heaven at the same moment. The shock of losing him gave me the break I needed. When I awoke in an unfamiliar bed, I recalled that we were overshadowed by a new war, that a general election was imminent and that unemployment was a problem which we could not solve “by pulling long faces”. Then I recollected the venomous, red-eyed author of that phrase; and the scene in O’Rane’s library was flashed on my brain like a scene in a film. I remembered Sonia’s jejune sympathy. I remembered finding Barbara in the car. I wondered dully how we stood after that bitter, mad outpouring; and, despite her note, I was thankful that we should not meet for a few days. Then I realized that for a few days I should have a respite enforced: from the paper, from war and unemployment, from everything that seemed at the moment more than I could bear. My first duty was to arrange for the memorial service at St. Margaret’s; and, as I watched the congregation arriving, I felt that the respite was extending, for an hour, to all of us. The obituary notices, the memoir which I was writing for one of the quarterly reviews, most of all this solemn tribute to a man, perhaps great, of an undeniably great past turned our thoughts backward to a time when France lived under a citizen-king and disunited Germany declaimed ineffectually at Frankfurt. Of the two former prime ministers who attended the service, both were hardly more than boys when my uncle first entered the House; the oldest head of a foreign mission had found “old Bertrand Oakleigh” an established institution when he was first accredited to the Court of St. James; and the journalists, the lawyers, the men of business, the bees and butterflies of society who moved sombrely to their places could not remember a time when the truculent Johnsonian figure had not been one of the familiar sights of London. “A great landmark gone,” whispered Dainton, as I waited for Barbara to arrive with the Crawleighs. “I didn’t always agree with him. Indeed, if you took a poll of the people here he _hadn’t_ quarrelled with . . .”