In time I tired of my Cassandra prophecies. Unlike his predecessors, Raymond Stornaway was face to face with a world in which every one would for many years be trying to pay for the war; and I fancy the annual income of the trust had been handsomely exceeded before each of us had explained the best method of spending it. While my sister Beryl, with her hospital training, launched vague projects for stamping out phthisis and cancer, Gervaise rebuilt the more unsightly parts of England. Hornbeck petitioned for an arctic expedition; and Barbara threw the stock-markets into confusion by paying off the national debt. “I don’t say it’s impossible,” I told them in conclusion, “but Lancing wasn’t the only multimillionaire in history. Other people have faced his problem, but none of them solved it.” 3 In the two years that followed, O’Rane and I were to hark back many times to this first discussion; but we suspended it now before I learned what part he was assigning me in his moral revolution. The invitations which I had scattered so impulsively in Paris matured disconcertingly at the same moment; and we were dragged from our lazy reminiscences and lazier speculations to disagree fiercely about frontiers of which I had never heard and which I suspected Lucien de Grammont of inventing. As my mother’s villa was by now full, our guests overflowed to the Regina and came to us only for meals and for a preliminary peace conference at sundown. Daily, with noses sensitized to the lure of gin and vermouth, the dark and voluble spokesmen of the new states collected to redraw the map of Europe. Through indolence or defective imagination, the rest of us took little part in the earlier discussions: the peace, like the armistice, would be based on President Wilson’s fourteen points; and I for one was thankful that it was some one else’s business to unravel these unpronounceable Balkan combinations and to delimit these undiscoverable Baltic states. “The English are incurably insular!,” Lucien fumed at short intervals. “If you would look at politics from a _European_ point of view, George . . .” “It was our love for the European point of view,” Hornbeck retorted, “that made us shoulder a heavier burden than any other power. Our contribution in money, men, ships . . .” Though the claim was inoffensive enough to my “insular” hearing, he was not allowed to finish. The war, we were assured in spluttering rotation, had been won wholly and solely by the Belgians in their first defence of Liège and Namur; wholly and solely by Russian numbers; wholly and solely by French endurance and strategy. Italy and Rumania had won it by intervening to prevent a stalemate; the United States by pouring in money and men at a time when the allies were exhausted. For an hour the verandah was like a Tower of Babel attacked by a swarm of bees.