"I was full of this idea of courage, my back to the wall and fighting the universe. So I just shut myself up, got a little journalism—sporting journalism it was, football matches and boxing and cricket—and grouched along. The other men on the sporting paper thought me too conceited for words and left me alone. I drank a bit too, the worst kind of drinking, alone in one's room.
"Then the War came, thank God. I won't bother you with that, but it kept me occupied until the Armistice, then suddenly I was flung back again with all my old troubles thick upon me once more. I remember one day I had been seeing a rich successful novelist. He talked to me about his successes until I was sick. Then in the evening I went and saw the other end of the business, the young unpopular geniuses who are going to change the world. Both seemed to me equally futile, and once again I was tempted to end it all and just let myself go when I suddenly, standing there in Piccadilly Circus, saw myself just as I had years before at Treliss and my pretentiousness and lack of humour and proportion. And I saw how small we were, and what children, and how short life was, and then and there I swore I'd never take myself so seriously again as to talk about 'going to the dogs,' or 'fighting fate,' or 'being a success,' or 'destiny being against me.' I cheered up a lot after that. That was my second turning-point. You and Henry have made the third."
"Me and Henry?" said Millie, regardless of grammar.
"That's why I've burdened you with this lengthy discourse. I haven't spoken of myself for years to a soul. But I want your friendship. I want it terribly and I'll tell you why.
"You and Henry are young. I see now that it's only the young who matter any more. If you take the present state of the world from the point of view of the middle-aged or old, it's all utterly hopeless. We may as well make a bonfire of London and go up in the sparks. There's nothing to be said. It's as bad as it can be. There simply isn't time for even the young middle-aged to set things right. But for the young, for every one under thirty it's grand. There's a new city to be built, all the pieces of the old one lying around to teach you lessons—the greatest time to be born into in the world's history.
"And what the middle-aged and old have to do is to feed the young, to encourage them, laugh at them, give them health and strength and brains, such as they are, to stiffen them, to be patient with them, and for them, not to lie down and let the young trample, but to work with them, behind them, around them—above all, to love them, to clear the ground for them, to sympathize and understand them, and to tell them, if they shouldn't see it, that they have such a chance, such an opportunity, as has never before been given to the son of man.
"For myself what is there? The world that was mine is gone, is burnt up, destroyed. But for you, for you and Henry and the great company with you. Golly! What a time!"
He mopped his brow. He looked at Millie and laughed.
"Please forgive me," he said. "I haven't let myself go like this for years!"
Millie's sympathy was, for the moment, stronger than her vocabulary, her sympathy, that is, for the earlier part of his declaration. As he recounted to her his own story she had been readily, eagerly carried away, feeling the absolute truth of everything that he said, responding to all his trouble and his loneliness. When he had spoken of his boy she had almost loved him, the maternal in her coming out so that she longed to put her arms round him and comfort him. He seemed, as every man seems to every woman, at such a time, himself a child younger than she, more helpless than any woman. But at the end he had swung her on to another mood. She did not know that she liked being addressed as The Young. She felt in this, as she had always before felt with him, that there was something a little priggish, a little laughable in his earnestness. She did not see herself in any group with thousands of other young men and young women. She was not sure that she felt young at all—and in any case she was simply Millicent Trenchard with Millicent Trenchard's body, ambitions and purposes. She had also instinctively the Trenchard distrust of all naked emotions nakedly displayed. This she was happily to conquer—but not yet.