e mind is
least able to contemplate the present with equanimity, the future with
fortitude, and the past without regret. Every thinking man, however,
knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden,
and spectre-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are
waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief
moment of our armour of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves
as we are--frightful chumps in a world where nothing goes right; a
grey world in which, hoping to click, we merely get the raspberry;
where, animated by the best intentions, we nevertheless succeed in
perpetrating the scaliest bloomers and landing our loved ones
neck-deep in the gumbo.

So reflected Freddie Rooke, that priceless old bean, sitting
disconsolately in an arm-chair at the Drones Club about two weeks
after Jill's departure from England, waiting for his friend Algy
Martyn to trickle in and give him dinner.

Surveying Freddie, as he droops on his spine in the yielding leather,
one is conscious of one's limitations as a writer. Gloom like his
calls for the pen of a master. Zola could have tackled it nicely.
Gorky might have made a stab at it. Dostoevsky would have handled it
with relish. But for oneself the thing is too vast. One cannot wangle
it. It intimidates. It would have been bad enough in any case, for
Algy Martyn was late as usual and it always gave Freddie the pip to
have to wait for dinner: but what made it worse was the fact that the
Drones was not one of Freddie's clubs and so, until the blighter Algy
arrived, it was impossible for him to get his cocktail. There he sat,
surrounded by happy, laughing young men, each grasping a glass of the
good old mixture-as-before, absolutely unable to connect. Some of
them, casual acquaintances, had nodded to him, waved, and gone on
lowering the juice,--a spectacle which made Freddie feel much as the
wounded soldier would have felt if Sir Philip Sidney, instead of
offering him the cup of water, had placed it to his own lips and
drained it with a careless "Cheerio!" No wonder Freddie experienced
the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi's
Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling
his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city
reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka-bottle
empty.

Freddie gave himself up to despondency: and, as always in these days
when he was