a curious thing to have all the mathematics of life upset. It makes one feel like being in a mad-house. The laughter of Arch and Humpy rising in shrieks from the gardens seems incredible and wonderful. The security of childhood becomes the most precious thing on earth.
So you see how difficult it is to remember what my feelings were in 1913. I have told you about how the American quartette descended on us at Saracens, and I've told you about my clairvoyant moment at dinner, when I saw through them all as though an X-ray machine had been turned on them. I don't want to go into all the complex impressions of their personalities and the queer, surcharged atmosphere that their minds altogether there, created in the house, because Louise's wretched mind dominated them all for me as the evening went on, just as her voice drowned their voices and her tragedy eclipsed their little troubles. Phyllis and Binky may have been under a strain; no doubt they were. Pat may have been uncomfortable, though I don't believe he was. Claire, undoubtedly, drew a certain sinister satisfaction form Phil's helplessness. But all those things scarcely count at all compared to the dreadful tension stretched over Louise and Jim. I had a feeling of something drawn round them, very tight, enclosing them in a space like the inside of a balloon, where the gases of their misery and distrust swelled to bursting. And the final act was just the bursting of a bubble that had been strained too long. And it seems, now, scarcely more important in the sum total of the world's tragedy than the bursting of a toy balloon, buyable for a penny, and in competition with the roar of armaments, scarcely more noisy.
And yet, if we are immortals, all of us, then it was, of course, much more than that, and the amount of pain that was mine afterward, and the cowardly giving in to the hopeless boredom of life that resulted from it, all that will be balanced up against me, I suppose. I suppose my giving in
