“But London, without you, would simply not be London!,” said Lucien de Grammont, who was taking us to stay with him at his father’s house by the Etoile. “It will perhaps be better for London, certainly better for me, if we both make a fresh start,” she answered. “I’m rather tired of it all.” “Of London in war? Naturally!,” Lucien persisted. “And for the first months after the war, when we look for the familiar faces and have to tell ourselves that they will not come back . . . Later on . . .” “Later on, we must see how we feel,” I said; and the conversation swung on to a less dangerous tack. Though we never discussed her adventures in the days before our marriage, I felt that Barbara was thinking less of the familiar faces, which she would not see again, than of those which would inevitably reappear in London when each man returned to his own place. Among our distressingly free-spoken friends it was commonly reported that she was half engaged at the beginning of the war to young Jack Waring; and, though she never pretended to be in love with him, the engagement—according to the Crawleighs—kept her from marrying Eric Lane, with whom she was in love beyond all shadow of doubt. Jack was in England looking for work. Eric had been lecturing and travelling in America and Japan; he would be coming to England as soon as he had a new play to produce. I did not want Barbara to be reminded, I did not want to be reminded myself, that she only married me when Eric vanished from her world. “We want to begin our married life in some place with no associations,” she went on, half to herself. Then, as though to protest that she was not thinking of Eric, she looked up with a smile and took my arm. “George and I have had no honeymoon yet; and my beloved parents didn’t make things very comfortable for us when I married without a dispensation. Perhaps they’ll be more reconciled if we give them a holiday. . . . How soon will peace be signed?” “That depends how soon the conference opens,” Lucien answered with a shrug. “You are to have your general election first; and we . . . you will not find we are in any hurry. There are nearly five lost years to make up. France too is tired.”