It is with the life of that generation and not with gossip about this or that member of it that I am concerned. A new and inexcusable terror is added to social intercourse when the confidence, the indiscretion or the malice of a dinner-table is industriously recorded and published; and it is still believed by some who were trained in a tradition of reticence that intimate portraits and studies should be withheld so long as the originals or their friends can be offended or hurt by unsought publicity. While a man of even thirty-three, spending most of his life in London, may have met more than a few of the statesmen and financiers, the sailors and soldiers, the artists, authors and actors who have now chief place in the interest of their countrymen, I feel that it would be impudent for him publicly to scatter his unsolicited opinion on those whom he has been invited to meet privately. This book will therefore be free from what has been called an "index of improper names." It would be no less impudent for him to assume that anyone is interested in the insignificances of his private life. I venture to write of this epoch because I hope to present some aspects of it which might elude the historian who ranges over a wider field, preeminently the aspect from the standpoint of youth. Any autobiographical matter deserves no more honourable place than a footnote and is included only to explain how and why one super was found at certain times on a certain stage. The generation which ended with the Peace of Versailles in 1919 is likely to be cut off from all that follows more completely than any of which we have record: a higher proportion of its youth has been destroyed, and of those who remain hardly one has been left in the place that he filled before the war; the standard and distribution of wealth have changed; and former lines of social demarcation have been obliterated. Though the old forms continue, the life that inspires them is new: the schools and universities, the learned professions and public services, the government itself are manned from a different class and actuated by different ideals. It may be not altogether wasted labour to sketch a corner of that old world as it was known to the men who were reared in time to be sacrificed in the late war.