Robert Browning: Andrea del Sarto.
1
Before we settled in London for the summer of 1920, I asked Bertrand whether he was prepared to run our paper without me if I could persuade Barbara to dull the edge of her grief by coming round the world with me.
“You’ll be leaving us,” answered my uncle rather blankly, “just at the moment when life is becoming normal after the war. We’ve hideous labour-troubles in store; unemployment . . . From all I hear, there’s going to be an explosion in Ireland.”
“And this,” I interrupted, “is what you describe as normal conditions after the war?”
Bertrand nodded slowly over his clasped hands:
“I do. A peace-treaty you may regard as another aspect of war: the last chapter, if you like. Then you come to that which remains: the bill that’s still unpaid when you’ve counted your dead and disbanded your armies and dismembered your empires. All the complications of our spiritual convalescence are before us. Still . . .”
I might have spared him my importunity until I had approached Barbara. With the choice of six months in London and twelve on a steamer, she had no difficulty in making up her mind; and I soon found myself studying, in her company and from a somewhat different angle, “that which remained” in London after eighteen months of armistice and peace. If the life was a little bewildering and sometimes more than a little uncongenial, that—as Bertrand would have said—was part of the unpaid bill.
2
“One swallow may not make a summer,” said my cousin Laurence, when his long-suffering sister banished him from Loring House to the admittedly inferior amenities of Seymour Street; “but one duchess is going to make a season. Eleanor Ross has decided that London is again to be the metropolis of England.”