Those who have never edited a paper are inclined to compare themselves with Delane at his most legendary; and the comparison is seldom favourable to Delane or to _The Times_. Those who have never tried to influence opinion—as my uncle and I tried in six years’ devoted service to the Disarmament League—become in their daydreams a rival to Parnell or Gladstone and convert mass-meetings with a single speech. Hard-won experience had taught me better, yet this is what Bertrand proposed; and Barbara, I knew, was seeing herself already as the maker of cabinets and the adviser of kings. “_Read your Balzac_,” my uncle recommended in a disastrous postscript. “_London, for the next few years of your life, will be amazingly like Paris in the restoration-period . . ._” It was the postscript, I think, that fired Barbara’s imagination; and, as I watched her big eyes lighting up, I knew that it was empty to ask if she felt competent to stay a glacial age in its course. For a year or two before the war, she had occupied a position that, so far as I know, had never before been accorded in England to an unmarried woman, certainly to an unmarried woman of twenty. Raised above ordinary laws by her utter fearlessness, she had imposed a law of her own, in dress and manners, speech and thought, upon the greater part of her generation. As a child, Barbara has often told me, she saw that her personality would be bled white by her father’s. In Ottawa, in Simla and in London her wings beat unceasingly against the political, the religious and the social bars of the Crawleigh cage. Then she asserted herself; and, ten years later, she was known by sight wherever an illustrated paper penetrated; the first colonial contingents demanded to see Westminster Abbey and Lady Barbara Neave; and, had she ever paused, she might have seen herself becoming a legend in her own lifetime, as Bernhardt—on vastly more bizarre lines—became the heroine of the ‘Sarah myth’ in France. I had my answer to the question which I had asked myself on Armistice Day, when she gazed into the fire for a picture of what her own new life was to be. London, in the restoration-period, was marked out for her empire.