At the end of March, as Bertrand had ordained, our first editorial dinner took place. It was followed by a reception; and the two events might have been read, by the optimistic, as an announcement that a new force was at work in political and social London. Throughout the long preparations, Barbara told us repeatedly that she had no personal interest in our organization; but she could not have worked harder if this had been a battle which she had to win or a lost battle which she had to retrieve. For the first time since our marriage, she seemed fully alive; the old love of ascendancy had returned; and I forgot the futility of my uncle’s crusade in the happiness which it brought to my wife. “Well, I wasn’t going to spoil _your_ life, if I could help it,” she laughed, when I complimented her on her new radiance. “Whatever kind of mess I’ve made of my own . . .” “It’s early days to be saying you’ve made a mess of your life,” I told her. These first weeks had been less formidable than I had expected. Every one was too busy with his own concerns to recall the furious tongue-wagging of the war; and the players in what Barbara counted her tragedies had obligingly withdrawn from the stage. Jack Waring, the first of her victims, crossed my path but once in three years: I met him hurrying out of his tailor’s, and he stopped only long enough to say that he was breeding blood-stock in the midlands and hardly ever came to London. Eric Lane, a greater sufferer in a longer tragedy, had disappeared; I was told that he was in London and I assumed that he must be at work on a new play. Certainly we did not see him for several months; and it was only in rare, startling moods of depression that Barbara seemed to remember him. “How much you feel depends on how much you put into life,” she suggested, a little wistfully. “You can make a mess of your life when you’re a child, if you go the right way about it. _You_ wouldn’t, because you let other people live your life for you; but I always had to make mine a great spiritual adventure, a thing to be squeezed dry, not tasted! At the end I must feel that I’ve taken a wonderful journey and that every moment of it has been marked by poignant emotions, vivid experiences. The whole of myself must go into everything.” “When you see a WET PAINT sign, you must make sure that the paint is really wet?,” I asked. “With both hands! Unlike my dear George, who avoids all paint because some of it is sometimes not quite dry. We’re a strange and wonderful combination, darling.” “The actor and the audience.” “You’re content just to look on?” “Life is varied enough!,” I said. “And, though I don’t suppose any period is dull when you know it, I believe our own period is the most interesting in all history. I believe, too, that we’re in the most interesting part of the most interesting period. Bertrand will tell you that our day is over and that the future lies with the new men. I’m watching.”