“We’re here to tell people the truth, even if it’s an unpleasant truth,” Bertrand rejoined with stern virtue; and our shorthand-writer looked up encouragingly to see if this also was to be a battle-cry.
Then, as Wright and Spence-Atkins had been given their orders, he packed me out of the office to collect material for six articles on England in Reconstruction.
“The great pulse of the people,” he ordained as my objective. “London’s a hot-house: abnormal.”
2
My last duty, before taking the road, was to attend little Ivy Maitland’s wedding.
She had wasted no time, I thought, in consoling herself for the loss of Eric Lane; but the quick decisions and quicker changes of this period were a conspicuous part of the “abnormality” which my uncle found devastating London in the first years of peace. We attended the ceremony, on O’Rane’s entreaty, to support Ivy, who was out of favour with most of her friends; and we went on to the reception in the hope of comforting Mr. Justice Maitland, who was deriving a morose satisfaction from prophesying the inevitable misery which his daughter was laying up for herself. I seem to possess an irresistible fascination for elderly bores; and the first chapter in my survey of England might have been headed: Maitland on the Decay of Faith and Morals.
“It would break your heart,” he told me, “if you listened to some of the stories I have to hear in the Divorce Court. If young people thought less of themselves and more of their elders . . . The churches have lost their grip. Young people don’t take us into their confidence.”
“Did they ever,” I asked, “where marriage was concerned?”
The judge pursued his denunciation without a check:
“Headstrong children like Ivy rush into it quite cynically. Their deepest affections are not engaged, so they have little to fear from failure; as for the scandal, none of their friends think the worse of them.”