This first of many receptions might have been arranged, I thought, as a review of all that the war had left us. Barbara stood at the stair-head in a white shawl of Chinese silk, with flamingoes in flight and a deep fringe sweeping to the scarlet heels of her white shoes. One shoulder, miraculously whiter than the shawl, was bare; a high comb of dark tortoise-shell proclaimed the astonishing fairness of her skin; and in the soft light of the chandelier her deep-set eyes shone like huge sapphires. I stopped in stupefaction to realize that this was my wife; and Barbara, reading my thoughts, coloured softly and pressed my hand. As our guests came self-consciously up the stairs, I saw one after another checking in the same bewilderment; and Raymond Stornaway supplied the image that was eluding me when he exclaimed: “A wand! A wand! You sweet child, with a wand in your hand you’d be the fairy queen I fell in love with at my first pantomime, fifty years before you were born.” As I had taken little part in sending out the invitations, I have only an indistinct memory of all who came. A phalanx of perpetually disapproving relations gave place to a battalion of my old Admiralty colleagues, headed by Hornbeck; new young diplomats, representing yet younger, newer states, raised Barbara’s hand ceremoniously to their lips; _débutantes_ of a generation after mine pressed under the elbows of old family friends, who blocked the traffic while they retailed trivial anecdotes of my wife’s or my infancy. Here and there I saw an actress, whose name in private life always eluded me; time and again I uttered or received a warning against ‘the world’s worst bore’. I remember being introduced, after frantic, whispered explanations, to innumerable authors in tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles. In my turn, I remember introducing to Barbara the lost political sheep whom she was to charm back into their fold. “I didn’t know there were so many people in the _world_!,” she exclaimed in one of the few brief lulls. Raymond Stornaway overheard her and sighed: “It’s the summer and autumn without the spring.” As the brief lull ended, my thoughts went back to the morning of Armistice Day when I paused on my way home from the Admiralty to reckon how many of my own generation had survived the war. As Robson bent, straightened himself and turned at the stair-head, I expected at every moment to hear him calling out “Captain Dainton” or “Lord Loring” or “Mr. Arden”; had I shut my eyes to their absence, I could have fancied that we were living in 1914. Now, as then, Crawleigh was so much engrossed in a political altercation with Bertrand that he walked stormily into the drawing-room without noticing us; Sam Dainton trotted up grinning—as usual—and whispering scandal into Violet Loring’s reluctant ear; Sir Roger, waiting uneasily for his wife, was mistaken—as usual—for a hired waiter and urged to tell John Gaymer where he could get his usual drink.