“You can’t expect people to take much interest in public affairs,” Lady Dainton said to me at this first dinner. “There are _so_ many other things! These children”—she looked benevolently round the table at the girls she had collected for the approval of her necessitous son—“they don’t know what society _was_ before the war. They’ve none of them even been presented, so you can imagine the flutter they’re in. Their first season!” “I shouldn’t have thought any one had the money to make much of a season,” I objected, with a cast back to her late confession of universal ruin. “The war has only transferred it from one pocket to another,” she assured me. This dark saying was made plain in these first unsettled days before the rebirth of our paper, when I drifted about London, analysing the atmosphere of the armistice. Less diplomatically, Lady Dainton might have said that, if the natives had too little money, the foreigners had too much; and, without a trace of diplomacy, a number of my acquaintances seemed to be coaxing it back from the new pockets to the old. With my own ears I heard the Duchess of Ross demanding a list of the Americans she could advantageously invite to her house. I listened with amusement as Clifford van Oss tried to explain politely that the people on whom she fawned were not received in New York. And I watched Sir Adolf Erckmann being made a test case for the date at which a wealthy man with a German name could be received by his less wealthy friends. “The great movement of men isn’t carrying me anywhere in particular,” I confessed to Bertrand as the day of our first issue drew near. “I’ve met a number of spongers, lately, and a greater number of snobs. Which are the more to be pitied . . .” “That’s only a phase,” my uncle answered. “London’s only a part of England; these people are only a part of London. While you were a boy, you must have seen the Rand Jews agonizing to fill their houses; and you saw the ‘new poor’ of the Harcourt death duties taking all they could get.” “And we saw the result in the last years before the war,” I said, as Sir Adolf Erckmann shambled out of earshot. Could we give rein to our racial prejudices, I never knew whether I would sooner lynch him or the girls, like Sonia Dainton, who in those days had endured his odious familiarities for the sake of a string-quartet, a champagne supper and a free drive home in an Erckmann car. “A whole generation grew up in the belief that man had a natural right to be amused at some one else’s expense.”