“But what about losing lives and legs and arms?” she put to him. “How did you manage to do all that and slack as well?”
“People are getting fat on that remark,” he told her darkly, “and are going to get still fatter—until one day something pricks them and then they’ll be all thin and miserable. I beg you not to play the fool with your lovely slim figure, Virginia. But I’m sure you said that as a way of sympathising about my arm, which is nice of you, but not an argument....”
“I’m not arguing,” Virginia said. “I’m being treated like a public institution. Very queenly I feel....”
He wanted her to understand.
“But you do know, don’t you, that it’s as easy to fight for a country as for a woman, particularly if they are yours? And that it’s much easier to fight for a country or a woman than to understand either—or even want to, for the matter of that! Why, Virginia, they said the war was going to teach us things, they’ve actually got the cheek to say now that the war has taught us things, fine things. Well, I’m damned if I see what the war has taught us except that it’s pretty easy for every sort of man to die—and now the peace is mobilising to teach us that it’s jolly difficult for every sort of man to live. That’s a platitude, of course, but that doesn’t make it less true.” He seemed to be angry about it.
Virginia nodded. It wasn’t difficult for her to live, if having money is living, but she understood. This was fairly good sense, anyway, for politics. Virginia had always thought that politics were only interesting from a bad-tempered point of view.
“That’s what I meant,” he went on, “when I said all the youngish people are slacking. They are taking no hand in the work of the country, they are doing nothing about it and thinking nothing about it. At least our fathers tried to use what energy and intelligence they had left over from riding horses and talking about them; they tried to do something as a matter of course, even if they had to sandwich that something between a salmon and a grouse, and a pretty fine mess they made of it—but we don’t even make a mess, we sit and watch other people making a mess for us.”
The light of argument peeped faintly out of Virginia’s eyes.
“You don’t seem to realise,” she said, “that England expects every young man not to get in the way of other people doing their duty. So our young men have simply had to stand aside—or go into the Foreign Office, which is the same thing—for it’s been so dunned into them that they’re no use for anything that now they jolly well aren’t. You can’t tell the public-schools for years and years that they produce nothing but fatheads and then expect them to turn out geniuses....”
“It’s been made very difficult for us not to slack,” she said.