came edgeless ... they entertained themselves
with big, splashy things, asking for noise and glare and an inchoate
massing of colour, and crowds and crowds of bare girls. There was a
demand for Nakedness, not the nakedness of cleanly, natural things, but
the Nakedness that is partly covered, the Nakedness that hints at
Nakedness....

"That's inevitable, I suppose," Henry thought to himself.

The sloppier journalists made a cult of blasphemy and foul speech. The
drill-sergeant was regarded as the most entertaining of humourists, and
decent men who had never done more than the normal and healthy amount of
swearing, began to believe that it was impossible to be manly unless one
bloodied every time one spoke: and swearing, which is a good and
wholesome and manly and picturesque thing, suddenly became like the
gibbering of an idiot.... One was led to believe that the drill-sergeant
spent his time in ordering men to "bloody well form bloody fours!" It
was immaterial to the sloppier journalists that the drill-sergeant did
not do anything of the sort ... and so the legend grew, of a great Army
going into battle, not with the old English war-cries on their lips or
with new cries as noble, but with "Bloody!" for their watch-word, and
"Who were you With Last Night!" for their war-song....

6

"I often wonder what things will be like when the war is over," Mrs.
Graham said. "Men can't live like that without some permanent effect.
Their habits will be rougher, more elementary, I suppose, and they'll
value life less highly. I don't see how they can help it. You can't see
men killed in that careless way ... and feel any sanctity about life. I
think life will be harsher for women after the war than it was
before...."

She remembered that Ninian's father had always declared that the
Franco-German War had brutalised Germany.

"He'd lived in Germany for a long while," she said, "and people
admitted that Germany had changed after the War ... grown coarser and
leas kindly!..."

They talked on in this strain until the clock chimed twelve. The storm
still blew over the house, but the rain had ceased, and when they looked
out of the window, they could see a rift in the clouds, through which
the moon tore her way.

"Good-night, Henry," she said, bending towards him, and he kissed her
cheek and then opened the door for her.

"Good-night!" he said.

7

Ninian came home on the next day, and when they had told him the news of
He