I have forgotten almost everything about that dinner except the sense of depression that grew deeper with every advance to gaiety on the part of my neighbours. We were spared speeches; but at the end our host called us to our feet for some toast which I did not hear. As I sat down, a kite’s-tail of coloured paper floated to us from the next table. A giant bunch of air-balloons was divided among eager hands. Crackers exploded; and a blare of tin trumpets punctuated the cheeping of wooden whistles. Perhaps I had spent too many hours that day in discussion that led nowhere: I suddenly felt that I was not in the mood for such artless merry-making. “_Si monumentum requiris_ . . .” Bertrand repeated. At the table from which that tail of coloured paper had been thrown, I observed my old ally, Sir Philip Saltash, entertaining a party of friends. Dainton, in acknowledging a bow, informed us that Saltash had “done as much as any one to win the war”; and, in examining Saltash’s guests, I felt that the same tribute could be paid to each. Wilmot Dean, representing a government of new men and new methods, was resting a flushed face on the bare shoulder of a beautiful and, I should imagine, wholly brainless mannequin. Lord Lingfield, whose inclusion in the cabinet shewed that ministers were not indifferent to rank and lineage, was deep in conversation with a Balkan millionaire who had been naturalized in time to become private secretary to the needy holder of a sinecure. And any one with attention to spare had it unpityingly claimed by Mr. ‘Blob’ Wister, who had won the war by purchasing papers for the government. I did not know the rest. I did not greatly want to know them. If I had been asked who won the war, I should have named David O’Rane rather than Wilmot Dean, Lord Loring rather than Lord Lingfield. Saltash’s guests may have given body and soul to victory; but their material position was founded on the war. After fine winnowing, we had arrived—in these ‘new men’—at the governing class of the immediate future: borrowing the name from ‘Blob’ Wister, they called themselves “realists”, and the coalitions of 1915 and 1916 had certainly intrigued the “sentimentalist” in politics to his extinction. Peace was too welcome for me to complain if it had been ushered in by ministers with more ambition than scruple. An obsolescent administration may have needed business brains to fit it for war; a democratic country cannot ignore its press-man and publicity-agent; and the rich hangers-on of a government only prove that bricks cannot be made without straw. Of the men who had won the war I only felt what Bertrand expressed bluntly: “They look as if they’d made a damned good thing out of it.” “Seventeen-ninety-three, eighteen-fifteen,” I replied. “Nineteen-fourteen to nineteen-nineteen. We have changed our rulers.” “It’s about all we _have_ changed,” Bertrand rejoined.