She had wasted no time, I thought, in consoling herself for the loss of Eric Lane; but the quick decisions and quicker changes of this period were a conspicuous part of the “abnormality” which my uncle found devastating London in the first years of peace. We attended the ceremony, on O’Rane’s entreaty, to support Ivy, who was out of favour with most of her friends; and we went on to the reception in the hope of comforting Mr. Justice Maitland, who was deriving a morose satisfaction from prophesying the inevitable misery which his daughter was laying up for herself. I seem to possess an irresistible fascination for elderly bores; and the first chapter in my survey of England might have been headed: _Maitland on the Decay of Faith and Morals_. “It would break your heart,” he told me, “if you listened to some of the stories I have to hear in the Divorce Court. If young people thought less of themselves and more of their elders . . . The churches have lost their grip. Young people don’t take us into their confidence.” “Did they ever,” I asked, “where marriage was concerned?” The judge pursued his denunciation without a check: “Headstrong children like Ivy rush into it quite cynically. Their deepest affections are not engaged, so they have little to fear from failure; as for the scandal, none of their friends think the worse of them.” “It’s a reaction from the cramping discipline of the war,” I answered. “The people who find their way into the Divorce Court are taking their revenge, in private lawlessness, for long submission to a machine that had neither body to be kicked nor soul to be damned.” If my explanation was heard, it was not answered. “One woman, my dear Oakleigh,” the judge recalled sombrely and unseasonably as his daughter drove away for her honeymoon, “actually asked me—in court—what was to be done with a husband who insulted her in public: it was not, she explained, as if they had not a home where he could do that. It’s terrible!” I agreed; but, as I could suggest no remedy, I took my leave and motored Barbara to Chepstow for a week before we set our hand on the great pulse of the people in Scotland. Most of the houses where we stayed had been closed for five years or turned into hospitals; and, as they opened their doors, I felt that the interrupted play of 1914 was being resumed on a stage from which all the old actors had departed. The new avenue at Loring Castle seemed no taller; if the dogs were older, they were for the most part the same dogs; but the present marquess was a four-year-old boy whose father was reported missing some eight-and-forty hours before he himself came into the world. The terrible emptiness of those days returned to me when I saw Violet walking by herself along the valley-terrace, where I had walked with her husband on the last night of peace.