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ely "polite," and can by no stretch of imagination be rightly called "conversation." It consists for the most part in exaggerated complimentary remarks--which, it is hoped, will please you--or in one person waiting impatiently while the other person relates all he and his family have been doing until he, in his turn, can seize a momentary pause for breath to begin the whole recent history of his own affairs in detail. But neither of them is really at all interested in the story of the other's doings--you can see that in their eyes, in the kind of fixed smile of simulated interest with which they listen, the while they furtively take note of the grey hair you are trying to hide, the shirt button which will leave its moorings if something isn't done for it before long, the stain on your waistcoat denoting egg-for-breakfast and an early hurry--all the things, in fact, which really interest them to an extent and are far more thrilling anyway than the things you are telling them in so much thraldom on your own part and with so much gusto. Some people are artificial through and through; it may be said of them that they are only really real when they are having a tooth pulled. But the majority of people only hide themselves behind a kind of crust of artificiality; beneath that crust they were real live men and women. And the war--thank God! (that is to say, if one ever can thank God for the war)--cracked that crust until it fell away, and was trampled under the feet of real men and women living real lives, honestly with themselves and _vis-a-vis_ the world. That is one of the reasons why the war has made social life a so much more vital and interesting state. Of course, there are some people who still strive to revive the social life of "masks," but they are the people whose crust of artificiality was only cracked--or rather chipped--by the horror and reality of war. War never really reached them, except through their stomachs and their motor cars, or perhaps in the excuse it gave them for flirting half-heartedly with some really useful human labour. They never went "over the top" in spirit, and their point of view still reeks of the point of view of the farthest back of the base. These people will be more real when they are _dead_ than while they are alive--if you can understand my meaning? But thank Heaven! their ranks are thinned. They belong to the "back of beyond," to the "frumps," the "washouts," and the "back
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