Fortune and I met also in a crowd, but indoors. Brand and Eileen O'Connor were both to be at one of the evening parties which assembled every now and then in a flat at Chelsea belonging to Susy Whincop, designer of stained-glass, driver of ambulances for the Scottish Women's Convoy, and sympathetic friend, before the war, of any ardent soul who grew long hair if a man, short hair if a woman, and had some special scheme, philosophy, or inspiration for the welfare of humanity.
I had known Susy and her set in the old days. They were the minor intellectuals of London, and I had portrayed some of them in a novel called "Intellectual Mansions," which they did not like, though I loved them all. They wrote little poems, painted little pictures, produced little plays, and talked about all subjects under heaven, with light-hearted humour, an arrogance towards popular ideas, and a quick acceptance of the new, the unusual and the revolutionary, in art and thought. Into their way of life war crashed suddenly with its thunder notes of terror. All that they had lived for seemed to be destroyed, and all their ideals overthrown. They had believed in beauty, and it was flung into the mud and bespattered with blood, and buried beneath the ugly monsters of war's idolatry. They had been devotees of liberty, and were made slaves of the drill-sergeant and other instruments of martial law. They had been enemies of brutality, cruelty, violence, but all human effort now was for the slaughter of men, and the hero
