ace."

"I derive a certain satisfaction from those prospects," replied Mr.
Punch on a note of reserve.

"But you ought to be jazzing for joy, like the other fools in their
Paradise of nigger minstrelsy."

"My years excuse me from choric exercises," said the Sage. "And, anyhow,
it doesn't take me that way."

"Then you are not in the movement. You are not in touch with the
spiritual pulse of our throbbing Metropolis; you take no active part in
the New Life that is springing from the seed of England's sacrifices.
True, your years, as you say, are against you, however well you wear
them: it is to the young that we look first for signs of the great
Regeneration. And in particular we look to those who are to be the
mothers of that future race which should reap the full harvest of our
blood and tears.

"And what do we find?" continued the Cynic. "We find a contempt for the
old virtues of simplicity and reticence; we find the distinction of sex
wiped out, and with it all reverence and sense of mystery. Nature is a
back number with them; they must for ever be plastering their noses
with powder--not just privily, as used to be the better way of faded
charmers, but shamelessly in public places. In dress they barely keep
within the bounds of decency prescribed by the police. They make their
own advances, rounding up and capturing their 'boys' for partners,
lest the haunts of jazzery should be closed against them. And in this
competition for their favours the good modest fellows who only a little
while ago were fighting our battles for us are now giving themselves the
airs of spoilt beauties. What do you make of all this in your scheme of
Renaissance?"

"I admit much of what you say," said Mr. Punch, "but I ascribe it, in
part at least, to a natural reaction from the strain and horror of War."

"'Reaction'!" snorted the Cynic. "A very comfortable word. But what were
the sufferings from which they are 'reacting'? The loss, you will say,
of the flower of our chivalry in battle? Well, one would think that
might have steadied them. Is this what our manhood died for--to make a
British carnival?"

"I don't pretend to understand that side of it," said the Sage, "but I
know that during the War we respected the silence of their grief; and I
know that nature must choose its own way of recovering from a loss and
reasserting its claim to happiness. Remember, too, that War must always
have its demoralising features, however splendid th