a very dull evening, my
dear fellow," he apologized. "Forgive me! We will talk of more
pleasant things. I drink wine with you! How is Cecil? Doing well
with her painting?"

Adrian attempted to relax his own inner grimness. He responded to
his uncle's toast. But he wished this old man, so very near the
mysterious crisis of his affairs, would begin to forego to some
extent the habit of a lifetime, become a little more human. This
ridiculous "facade"! The dinner progressed.

Through an open window the night, full of soft, distant sound, made
itself felt once more. The candles, under their red shades,
flickered at intervals. The noiseless butler came and went. How old
his uncle was getting to look, Adrian reflected. There was a
grayness about his cheeks; fine, wire-like lines about his mouth.
And he was falling into that sure sign of age, a vacant
absent-mindedness. Half the time he was not listening to what he,
Adrian, was saying; instead, his eyes sought constantly the shadows
over the carved sideboard across the table from him. What did he see
there? What question was he asking? Adrian wondered. Only once was
his uncle very much interested, and that was when Adrian had spoken
of the war and the psychology left in its train. Adrian himself had
not long before been released from a weary round of training-camps,
where, in Texas dust, or the unpleasant resinous summer of the South,
he had gone through a repetition that in the end had threatened to
render him an imbecile. He was not illusioned. As separate
personalities, men had lost much of their glamour for him; there had
been too much sweat, too much crowding, too much invasion of dignity,
of everything for which the world claimed it had been struggling and
praying. But alongside of this revolt on his part had grown up an
immense pity and belief in humanity as a mass--struggling, worm-like,
aspiring, idiotic, heroic. The thought of it made him uncomfortable
and at the same time elate.

His uncle shook a dissenting head. On this subject he permitted
himself mild discussion, but his voice was still that of an old,
wearied man, annoyed and bewildered. "Oh, no!" he said. "That's the
very feature of it that seems to me most dreadful; the vermicular
aspect; the massed uprising; the massed death. About professional
armies there was something decent--about professional killing. It
was cold-blooded and keen, anyway. But this modern war, and this
modern craze for self-revelatio