s just back from
France...." Once stories begun in this way would empty a room; but not
so now. Now they no longer devastate but fascinate. It does not matter
what the stories are about, the fact remains that an opening gambit
which three months ago would stamp a man as a triple bore now holds
everyone breathless. In short, relations at last have come to their own.
Another achievement of WILLIAM HOHENZOLLERN!

For the most part they bear upon German atrocities, just as a little
while ago they were the preliminaries to unmistakable evidence of the
presence in this country of thousands of Russians travelling from
Scotland to Southampton by underground passage and other mysterious
ways. I myself believed in those Russians absolutely, and relinquished
them with pain and sorrow; and all because they were attested to by
other people's relations. This helps to show what a hold the relation is
getting on us. In fact no story of the war is now possible without some
kith and kin in it.

Personally I am much out in the cold. Those two brothers I told you of
may serve to fill a gap now and then--a gap left by other more
entertaining raconteurs--but they are not, as I said, any real good.
Both are in England, and one will never leave it. But if things were
different.... If only that soldier brother had joined earlier and had
written to me from Rheims, say, or Compiegne, how my stock would fly up!
Or if that other one would even now fling away his truncheon, enlist in
time to share the march to Berlin, and then sit down to tell me all
about it, what a swell I should become! How dinner-parties would
assemble to hear me!

As it is, I have to-day to do the best I can either with the tame
home-keeping exploits of these two, or, by listening with excessive
sympathy or by other parasitical endeavour, acquire a reversionary
interest in someone else's relation's narrative. I have even, in order
to cut some sort of a figure in a company where relations were being
used with dashing success--I have even gone so far as to appropriate the
gardener's boy's uncle, last heard of from Cambrai, as a personal and
communicative friend, and claim an intimate association with his letter
home.

And how splendid if all that could be changed!

"My brother," I could say boldly and with truth,--"my brother has sent
me a few lines from Berlin, the substance of which you might care to
hear." Of course they would be falling over each other to hear, but that