r the sleek dark hair, which was brushed
straight back from his forehead, and over his sombre smoke-coloured
eyes in which a dusky glow came and went. Margaret, watching him with
her pensive smile, thought that she had never seen him look so
"interesting."

"We used to talk in those first days about the 'spiritual effect' of the
war," he resumed dreamily, speaking more to himself than to his
companion. "As if organized violence could have a steadying
effect--could have any results that are not the offspring of violence.
It is hard for me to talk about it. I've never even tried before to put
it into words; but we are both suffering from the same cause, I think. I
know it has played the very deuce with my life. It has made me
discontented with what I have; but it hasn't shown me anything else that
was worth striving for. I seem to have lost the power of wanting because
I've discovered that nothing is worth having after you get it. Every
apple has turned into Dead Sea fruit."

He had never before spoken so freely, and when he had finished he felt
awkward and half resentful. Margaret's extraordinary frankness had
started him, he supposed, on a similar strain; but he wished that he had
kept back all that sentimental nonsense about what his mother called
disapprovingly, his "frame of mind." Any frame of mind except the
permanently settled appeared unsafe to Mrs. Culpeper; and her son felt
at the moment that her opinion was justified. Somehow the whole thing
seemed to have resulted from his meeting with Gideon Vetch. It was Vetch
who had "unsettled" him, who had taken the wind out of the stiff sails
of his prejudices. Had the war awakened in him, he wondered, the need of
crude emotional stimulants, the dangerous allurement of the unfamiliar,
the exotic? Would it ever pass, and would life become again normal and
placid without losing its zest and its interest? For it was the zest of
life, he realized, that he had encountered in Gideon Vetch.

"But you are a man," Margaret was saying plaintively. "Everything is
easier for a man. You can go out and do things."

"So can women now. You can even go into politics."

She made a pretty gesture of aversion. "Oh, I've been too well brought
up! There isn't any hope for a girl who is well brought up except the
church, and even there she can't do anything but sit and listen to
sermons. Mother's consolation," she added with a soft little laugh, "is
that I should have been a belle and be