He put into words something which I had been thinking since my arrival in Susy's rooms.
"We are the revenants, the ghosts who have come back to their old haunts. We are pretending that everything is the same as before, and that we are the same. But it's all different, and we have changed most of all. Five years of war have dug their hoofs into the faces of most people in this crowd. Some of them look fifteen—twenty years older, and I expect they've been through a century of experience and emotion."
"What's coming out of it?" I asked. "Anything big?"
"Not from us," said Wetherall. "Most of us are finished. Our nerves have gone to pieces, and our vitality has been sapped. We shall put down a few notes of things seen and understood. But it's the next generation that will get the big vision—or the one after next."
Then I was able to shake hands with Susy Whincop, and, as I have said, she left me in no doubt about the change that four years of war had made to me.
She held me at arm's-length, studying my face.
"Soul alive!" she said. "You've been through it all right! Hell's branding-irons have been busy with a fair-faced man."
"As bad as that?" I asked, and she answered very gravely, "As bad as that."
She had hardly changed, except for a few streaks of grey in her brown hair. Her low, broad forehead was as smooth as before, her brown eyes shown with their old steady light. She had not lost her sense of humour, though she had seen a good deal of blood and agony and death.
"How's humanity?" I asked, and she laughed and shrugged her shoulders.
"What can one do with it? I thought we were going to catch the old devil by the tail and hold him fast, but
