And then I fell to wondering what Sandy’s father would have made of the new dispensation which was taking shape before our eyes. He and I, who agreed on little else, agreed that we were saying good-bye, that last night at Loring Castle, to a phase in history. The old ruling families had lost their power since the first marquess commanded his fifteen seats in the unreformed House of Commons and “Trimmer” Crawleigh dodged in and out of George the Fourth’s ministries, leaving a broken government in his train; under a new distribution of wealth they might lose their prestige. The _arrivistes_ of the nineties, who had floated on waves of beer and diamonds into the arid heights of a depressed territorial aristocracy, would find their places taken, in the nineteen-twenties, by social adventurers of ambition equal to Lady Dainton’s and of wealth greater than Sir Adolph Erckmann’s. A new class of politician, officer, publicist and financier must inevitably be brought to birth by the new demands of public life: the sons of the new men would quickly preponderate in the old schools and universities, their daughters would soon come to dominate a new society. That which I had denounced, in my hotter radical days, as “privilege” would count for less in Sandy Loring’s life. It was not within my terms of reference to say if the one order was in any way better or worse than the other: it was different. My haphazard recollections, covering a period of about fifteen years, were chosen solely for the light which they threw on the generation that was of military age when war broke out. “_As_,” I wrote in conclusion, “_the French Revolution challenged and overthrew the territorial aristocracies and feudal kingships of the middle ages, so the Great War challenged the systems which the French Revolution had evolved in their place._” There—for the moment—I stopped, for no one could say what systems the Great War would evolve in place of those which it overturned. Later, in brooding over these reminiscences of a vanished generation, I began to read a moral into them; and, on the morning of Violet’s arrival, when Barbara bent over my chair to ask if I had finished my work, I had to answer that, so far as I could see, it was only beginning. “If I’m right,” I explained, “the old governing classes are being superseded, under our eyes . . .” “The new lot will pick up the old ideas,” she interrupted. “That’s just what I’m afraid of,” I said. 3