“If those who did most to win the war are going to have most voice in making the peace,” Hornbeck prophesied as we went up to dress, “you’ll be able to hear their deliberations in London. This dago-parliament is your remedy against future wars?” If I left his gibe unanswered, it was because the tone—still more the unanimity—of these impassioned voices had disquieted me. I can hardly say too often that my mother’s villa was a political vacuum: we all assumed that, when we emerged from it, we should find the armistice taking permanent form in a peace drawn on similar lines. I had not dreamed until this night that a new war was to be declared at the conference-table. Yet the demands of my excited young friends were of a kind that no signatory of the armistice could accept. Paul Sanguszko, I think, outdistanced all competitors by demanding a united Poland which in fact included more Germans than Poles; but Lucien, in his rape of Alsace, and Boscarelli, in his butchery of the Tyrol, were but a short head behind him. “Aren’t you rather forgetting your old panegyrics on nationality?,” I asked Lucien. “Are you handing back the German colonies?,” he demanded in his turn. “That’s for our dominions to say. I don’t know.” “_And_ you don’t care!,” Lucien rejoined bitterly. “Now that the German navy is out of the way, nothing else matters!” “With luck, George, this ought to be a peace to end peace,” Hornbeck whispered. Next day, I asked Barbara whether she was feeling homesick for England. I have been so long indentured to politics that the hint of a new development sets me fidgeting to be back amid the whispers of the clubs and the rumours of Fleet Street. Unless I could wholly discount the wild words of Lucien and his friends, the peace negotiations would develop very differently from my expectations; and, whether I could discount him or not, I was realizing for the first time how far we had travelled since the day when we talked of fundamental understanding and a common effort for a common cause. “Do you mean you’re tired of this place?,” asked Barbara with a smile. “I was only feeling we were rather out of things,” I answered. Then, as the “dago-parliament” collected round the cocktail-table for a morning session, I caught Hornbeck’s eye. “Are people in England talking the same kind of criminal nonsense?” “Well, the House is not sitting,” he summed up judicially. “On the other hand, there’s a general election raging. What you lose on the swings, you make on the roundabouts.” “If you _want_ to go back . . .,” Barbara was beginning with a sigh, when my mother came on to the verandah with a cable in her hand. It was from my uncle Bertrand: if we had a bed to spare, might he occupy it? Otherwise, would we engage a room for him at the Regina? He must see me at once. A letter was following; but, if we did not know already, he had lost his seat.