Why, soul and sense of him grow sharp alike,
He learns the look of things, and none the less
For admonition from the hunger-pinch."
Robert Browning: Fra Lippo Lippi.
1
It was not until I had introduced some little organisation into my work that I had opportunity or justification for seeing my friends. I have reached an age when I like to go early to bed between two long days of work; I never ceased to wonder, therefore, at the nervous vitality of some of the people whom I was meeting; London was fuller than I had ever known it, the customary autumn exodus had ended with the war; and, what with a few hundred officers home on leave and athirst for amusement, what with a few thousand girls working in hospitals, canteens and Government offices, anyone who wanted distraction had not to look long for it. The restlessness which seized London every summer before the war seemed to have increased and become permanent, with an astounding new licence which I found hard to understand. I suppose the war broke down most of the old social conventions, but I sometimes wondered in the early days whether there was anything which the strictly brought up and closely chaperoned young girl of other days was now not allowed to do....
Young O'Rane carried me off to my first war party. After I had looked for him unsuccessfully for some weeks, we had been dining at the House and talking business and school politics, for the Governors of Melton School had lately co-opted me in place of Aylmer Lancing, and I had heard from George that O'Rane was temporarily on the staff there. At ten o'clock he told me that he was due home for a house-warming and plunged into a description of his domestic life with all the eagerness of a child—which is what he was—shewing a new toy. Old Bertrand Oakleigh had given them the house as a wedding present; ever since his illness at the outbreak of war (no one was allowed to call it a stroke) the old man had needed some little attention; what easier than to set a couple of rooms aside for him? And the place was so big that you could give a shakedown to "most anyone"—and a meal. It was what O'Rane had always wanted to do—as in the Middle Ages (rather vaguely).... I should hardly believe some of the people he'd had there even in five weeks.... People were such fun; Beresford, for instance ... full of good stuff, full of white-hot idealism which only needed to be directed. "And he's fallen in love with my wife, so she's gently taming him."
He threw out his sentences with jerky exuberance, passionately serious at one moment and laughing at himself and me the next.
And that girl I had met, Hilda Merryon.... A little throb of anger came into O'Rane's voice; she had led a most awful life for about three years; some brute had victimised her, and her sanctimonious devil of a father had turned her out of the house.... Now she was a new woman, though years must pass before she overcame her bitterness and hatred towards the world, and, when he went back to Melton, she was coming as a sort of secretary....
We had reached the house, and he threw open the door and stood aside to let me in.