“But can it be done with a sixpenny review?,” I asked. 5 When our other guests had left us, Bertrand, Barbara and I set ourselves to collect our headquarters staff. “Old men,” boomed my uncle oracularly, “make wars; and young men fight them. We must be surrounded by the young men.” He then sat back, in the attitude which had become characteristic of him since his stroke, with his hairy, gnarled hands clasped over the ivory knob of his stick. I saw Barbara’s dark eyes shining as she hurried indoors and returned to the verandah with a pencil and paper. In her absence, Bertrand sought to seduce me by describing my room at the office and hinting at the furniture which he proposed to transfer from Princes Gardens. He resented my criticism that we were setting out to convert the world with six dubious Sheraton chairs and less than six more than dubious phrases; but, as we drafted our programme, I became ever more gloomily convinced that we were losing sight of the essentials in a wanton outburst of ornamentation. My excellent and unpractical colleagues agreed that we could have a delicious meal sent in from the Greyfriars Tavern for the editorial dinners; Barbara fought gamely for a weekly cartoon; Bertrand informed us, with an air of originality, that the youth of the nation were the trustees of posterity; and no one said a word about our gospel or our prophets. “All the conditions are new,” my uncle reminded me at short intervals. “We need new men, new methods. A new spirit . . .” And, while he coined phrases and Barbara designed our front page, I thought over the young men whom I had met when I was working at the Admiralty. Spence-Atkins and Jefferson Wright were still on Hornbeck’s “live register” of unemployed; and I invited them to take charge of our foreign policy and economics. That their names were unknown seemed a recommendation to Bertrand, who exclaimed in high glee: “New men! To catch the other new men!” On that, I presented him with a cynical jack-of-all-trades whom Hornbeck had engaged for his experience in the deeper waters of undetected roguery. I have no proof that Triskett’s hands were soiled, though a man whose friends included the scamps of every race and country must have lived under constant temptation to blackmail. I did not propose to give him free scope in what he wrote; but I thought that his curious information might sometimes illuminate an obscure motive. “A new man to catch the other new men,” Bertrand repeated. “A thief to catch a thief,” I answered; “but, if it’s youth you want, these men are all under thirty-five.” The average was reduced further when, at Barbara’s suggestion, I invited a novelist of thirty, a poet of twenty-five and a composer of nineteen to take our artistic pages under their protection. They were all, she told me, touched with genius. I was also becoming reckless.