"You'll have to see me looking as I am for a few days yet, Vio. My kit doesn't offer me much variety."
"Oh, well—!"
She accepted this as part of the inevitable strangeness in which she had become enveloped, making silent, desperate concessions. Because of this mood I was tempted to ask for five minutes' grace in order to look over the old house.
"You'll find things rather run down," she said, indifferently. "I've no good servants any more. They said that when the war was over it would be easier to get them; but it's a month now since the armistice was signed, and it's just as bad as ever."
"From that point of view, it will probably be worse," I remarked, when about to pass from the library into the hall. "The world isn't going back to what it was before the war. You can't stop an avalanche once it has begun to slide."
She watched me from where she stood before the fire, reproducing almost exactly the attitude of the fascinating woman overhead.
"Does that mean that you've come back a revolutionist, Billy? as well as everything else?"
"N-no; I haven't come back anything in particular. I'm just like you and all the rest of the world, a snowflake in the avalanche. I suppose I shall go tumbling with the mass."
A sense of something outlived came to me as I roamed through the house which Vio allowed me to visit by myself. After two years spent in a squint-eyed room of which the only decoration was three painted fungi this mellow beauty stirred me to a vague irritation. It was not a real dwelling for real people in the real world as the real world had become. It was too rich and soft and long established in its place. Three or four generations of Soameses and Torrances had stored its rooms with tapestries, portraits, old porcelains, and mahoganies; and for America that is much.
Over the landing where the stairway turned hung the famous Copley of Jasper Soames. For a good two minutes he and I faced each other in unspeakable communion. There was nothing between us but this stairway acquaintance, formed during the three years Vio and I had lived together; and yet somehow his being had stamped itself into mine.