“And now,” said Bertrand, “can you set them to work in three months’ time? You’ll want that to get in touch with new conditions. You must study life in the marketplace, George. Mass-feeling. The great movement of men. . . . We’ll have our first editorial dinner somewhere about the end of March.” “I should have it,” I suggested, “on the first of April.” When my uncle returned a few weeks later, we returned with him; and, while Barbara made our house ready for party-meetings and drawing-room conclaves, I carried the dubious Sheraton chairs to Fetter Lane and passed from the Eclectic Club to my uncle’s study in Princes Gardens, in leisurely pursuit of the great movement of men. I doubt if I have at any time felt more out of my element. I could understand O’Rane’s contention that, for all they won from civilization, the vast majority of mankind would be no worse off by taking to the hills and woods as bandits. I was prepared to work quite reasonably hard for my rooted faith that, if this vast majority was to be saved, it must be saved by its own efforts. I could sympathize with the proselytes to the League of Nations, though I placed no reliance in a league that did not make disarmament its first condition of membership. What I wholly failed to grasp was my uncle’s objective in taking an expensive office, exhuming our old manager from his retirement and entering the name of our paper once more at Stationer’s Hall. London had never, in all my experience, been so little interested in politics. “What’s been happening?,” Sam Dainton echoed when I took Barbara to dine with his parents. “Well, I’ve awarded myself the order of the bowler-hat; and I had the hell of a time in Paris after I left you; and now I’m thinking how I can make a bit of money.” “Same here,” added John Gaymer. “If you come across anything, George . . .” “Oh, the family first,” Laurence interrupted. “_Dear_ Cousin George . . .” The conversation at most dinner-parties in these weeks seemed to run on ways and means. Seizing on the jargon of the times at a moment when every one else was abandoning it, Lady Dainton described herself facetiously as “one of the new poor” and denounced every more fortunate neighbour as a “profiteer”, though I could not see that her novel poverty compelled her to retrenchment nor that her scorn for profiteers prevented Sir Roger’s trying to sell Crowley Court, at three times what he gave for it, to one of “the new rich”. In place of retrenchment I found a bewildering blend of ingenuity, industry and blackmail on the part of those who insisted on a life of pleasure and could find no one to finance it for them. Day after day, Barbara was dragged to new shops, where her friends sold her hats at exorbitant prices. Other friends offered to decorate our house. Others, again, begged me to open a “social” column in _Peace_ and to put them in charge of it.