Glancing at my manuscript for the last time before sending it to be typed, I felt that, in a week’s time, I might know better how to paint my third panel. We had to see now whether those who had failed to avert war were capable of ending war. 5 Though I charged O’Rane at the time with disturbing the repose of our retreat, I can see now that, even before I invited him to Cannes, I was resigned to moving at least one stage nearer to the heart of politics. It is true that my uncle Bertrand’s appeal for help in his election was answered with a lame reference to Barbara’s health; simultaneously I told Frank Jellaby, without a trace of lameness or indecision, that I was too little in sympathy with the liberal party to fight a seat on my own account; all the time, however, I was conscious of a chilling remoteness. I did not want to go back; I was thankful that Barbara seemed content to vegetate; but, if I was right in thinking that the fruits of the war remained to be gathered, I was right in thinking that they could not be gathered in Cannes. I hoped that O’Rane, with his knowledge of other countries, would tell me whether my derided ‘will to peace’ was practicable or even necessary. If he shared my misgivings, I wanted his help in planning a campaign that would be bounded only by the confines of the inhabited earth and would engage our energies for the rest of our lives. A train of reasoning is sometimes so persuasive in its premises and overwhelming in its conclusion that human intelligence rejects it without argument; and a train of this kind was presented to me on the eve of the armistice, when Hornbeck declared in succeeding breaths that another war would be synonymous with the end of the world and that nothing could prevent another war. His first premise was substantiated by all the evidence of the late war; his second was at least supported by every soldier and statesman whose memoirs I had been reading for the last month. The syllogism could only be refuted by a general strike against war. This was my revelation and mission; and I had suffered too long from the revelations and missions of others to trust my own until I had been put to the question. The O’Ranes arrived, with my sister and her husband, a week before Christmas. It was characteristic of the times that I should first set eyes on my brother-in-law two years after his marriage. Beryl wrote in 1916 to say that she was engaged to a certain Gervaise Maxwell, whom she had nursed at the Lorings’ hospital in Scotland. They parted after a week’s honeymoon: Beryl went back to House of Steynes, Gervaise rejoined his battalion in Mesopotamia; and they met for the second time four days after the armistice.