Looking back on the three months which we spent with my mother, I am in one way reminded of the two years which Jack Waring passed as a prisoner in Germany. So complete was our isolation that, when we emerged from it, we found a world of peace hardly less different from the one we had left than Jack’s war-world of tanks and gothas and tear-shells was different from the one which was blotted out in the early days of 1915. In the first weeks we saw no visitors; we read no papers; and, when we were rested enough to think and talk, we turned to the days when the world had last been at peace and speculated why the war had come and how other wars were to be prevented. The last of my reasons for hurrying abroad was that I could take up no work in England until I had discharged the task which Violet Loring imposed on me within a few hours of her husband’s death. As the world in which we had been brought up was swallowed by the war, she asked me to set down my memories of it for the later instruction of her boy. I had carried my account to 1915; but, after that, the mass of material was too great for me to attack in odd hours after my work at the Admiralty. A steamer-trunk, filled with memoirs and monographs, kept me company to Cannes; and, in the few weeks that remained before my cousin came to demand her bond, I philosophized about the deluge and described the world before it and speculated about the world that would appear when the waters had subsided. Small wonder if at this time, with my mother placidly dipping into Victorian biographies and with Barbara dreaming over her share in the history I was writing, we knew little and cared less about what was happening in Paris and London, Washington and Rome! While Lucien de Grammont drew the lines of a recreated Europe, I was living again through the years when Sandy Loring’s father and I were fellow-fags and fellow-monitors at Melton, when we were freshmen at Oxford, when we ventured together into Edwardian London. The dead so came to life, as I wrote about them, that sometimes I would lay down my pen and forget the war for the days before David O’Rane was blinded and Tom Dainton killed, the days when every one was quoting Barbara’s latest epigram and discussing Val Arden’s last novel, the days when Sonia Dainton broke a heart a week and an engagement a season. Musing of days and nights softened by time, I felt that never had there been such years in the life of any country, never had there been women and men like those of our generation. “In two or three years I expect everything will be very much as it was before the war,” predicted Barbara. “The people will be different,” I answered; “and they’ll make everything else different. Sandy’s world will never be like Jim’s.”