so
glad you were awake. Are you sure you don't want to go to sleep again?"
suddenly.

"Not in the least. Look at the sun beginning to touch the tips of the
little white clouds with rose. That stir among the leaves of the plane
trees is the first delicious breath of the morning. Go on and tell me
all about the party."

"It's a perfect time to talk," he laughed.

And there he sat and made gay pictures for her of what he had seen and
done. He thought he was giving her mere detail of the old Duchess'
dance. He did not know that when he spoke of new tangos, of flowers, of
music and young nymphs like tossed blossoms, he never allowed her for a
moment to lose sight of Mrs. Gareth-Lawless' girl. She was the light
floating over his vision of the happy youth of the assembly--she was the
centre--the beginning and the ending of it all.

CHAPTER II

If some uncomplex minded and even moderately articulate man or woman,
living in some small, ordinary respectable London house and going about
his or her work in the customary way, had been prompted by chance upon
June 29th, 1914, to begin to keep on that date a day-by-day diary of his
or her ordinary life, the effects of huge historic events, as revealed
by the every-day incidents to be noted in the streets, to be heard in
his neighbours' houses as well as among his fellow workers, to be read
in the penny or half-penny newspapers, would have resulted--if the
record had been kept faithfully and without any self-conscious sense of
audience--between 1914 and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human
document of immense historical value. Compared with it, the diaries of
Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless. But it must have been
begun in June, 1914, and have been written with the casualness of that
commonplace realism which is the most convincing realism of all. It is
true that the expression of the uncomplex mind is infrequently
articulate, but the record which would bring home the clearest truth
would be the one unpremeditatedly depicting the effect produced upon the
wholly unprepared and undramatic personality by the monstrous drama, as
the Second Deluge rose for its apparent overwhelming, carrying upon its
flood old civilisations broken from anchor and half submerged as they
tossed on the rising and raging waves. Such a priceless treasure as
this might have been the quite unliterary and unromantic diary of
any--say, Mr. James Simpson of any house number in any respe