in her parents' house. The old woman in Lancaster
Gate had not been capable either of talking or thinking about herself,
except as a fretful animal with certain simple bodily wants. In Helena,
Lucy Friend had for the first time come cross the type of which the world
is now full--men and women, but especially women, who have no use any
longer for the reticence of the past, who desire to know all they
possibly can about themselves, their own thoughts and sensations, their
own peculiarities and powers, all of which are endlessly interesting to
them; and especially to the intellectual _elite_ among them. Already,
before the war, the younger generation, which was to meet the brunt of
it, was an introspective, a psychological generation. And the great war
has made it doubly introspective, and doubly absorbed in itself. The mere
perpetual strain on the individual consciousness, under the rush of
strange events, has developed men and women abnormally.

Only now it is not an introspection, or a psychology, which writes
journals or autobiography. It is an introspection which _talks_; a
psychology which chatters, of all things small and great; asking its
Socratic way through all the questions of the moment, the most trivial,
and the most tremendous.

Coolness, an absence of the old tremors and misgivings that used
especially to haunt the female breast in the days of Miss Austen, is a
leading mark of the new type. So that Mrs. Friend need not have been
astonished to find Helena meeting her guardian next morning at breakfast
as though nothing had happened. He, like a man of the world, took his cue
immediately from her, and the conversation--whether it ran on the return
of Karsavina to the Russian Ballet, or the success of "Abraham Lincoln";
or the prospects of the Peace, or merely the weddings and buryings of
certain common acquaintances which appeared in the morning's _Times_--was
so free and merry, that Mrs. Friend began soon to feel her anxieties of
the night dropping away, to enjoy the little luxuries of the breakfast
table, and the pleasant outlook on the park, of the high, faded, and yet
stately room.

"What a charming view!" she said to Lord Buntingford, when they rose from
breakfast, and she made her way to the open window, while Helena was
still deep in the papers.

"You think so?" he said indifferently, standing beside her. "I'm afraid I
prefer London. But now on another matter--Do you mind taking up your
duties insta