though I liked him a good deal. But he seemed to need me, craving sympathy which I gave with sincerity, and companionship, which I could not give so easily, being a busy man.
It was on the night when London went mad, because of Peace, though not so mad, I was told, as on the night of Armistice. It all seemed mad to me when I was carried like a straw in a raging torrent of life which poured down the Strand, swirled round Trafalgar Square, and choked all channels westwards and eastwards of Piccadilly Circus. The spirit of London had broken bounds. It came wildly from mean streets in the slum quarters to the heart of the West End. The worst elements had surged up and mingled with the middle-class folk and those who claim exclusiveness by the power of wealth. In ignorance that all barriers of caste were to be broken that night, "society" women, as they are called, rather insolent in their public display of white shoulders, and diamonds, and furs, set out in motor-cars for hotels and restaurants which had arranged Peace dinners, and Peace dances. Some of them, I saw, were unaccompanied by their own men, whom they were to meet later, but the vacant seats in their open cars were quickly filled by soldiers, seamen, or merry devils in civil clothes who climbed over the backs of the cars when they were brought to a standstill in the crush of vast crowds. Those uninvited guests, some of them wearing women's bonnets, most of them fluttering with flags pinned to their coats, all of them provided with noise-making instruments, behaved with ironical humour to the pretty ladies, touched their coiled hair with "ticklers," blew loud blasts on their toy trumpets, delivered cockney orations to them for the enjoyment of the crowds below. Some of the pretty ladies accepted the situation with courage and good-humour,
