When he has had enough of such amiable gossip he quits the easy chair, in order to occupy another one in another room where he is surrounded by all the periodical literature of the entire world, and by the hushed murmur of intellectual conversation and the discreet stirring of spoons in tea-cups. Here he acquaints himself with the progress of the war and the fluctuations of his investments and the price of slaves. And when even the solemnity of this chamber begins to offend his earnestness, he glides into the speechless glamour of an enormous library, where the tidings of the day are repeated a third time, and, amid the companionship of a hundred thousand volumes and all the complex apparatus of research, he slumbers, utterly alone.
Late at night, when he has eaten and drunk, and played cards and billiards and dominoes and draughts and chess, he finds himself once more in the smoking-room--somehow more intimate now--with a few cronies, including one or two who out in the world are disguised as the enemy. The atmosphere of the place has put him and them into a sort of exquisite coma. Their physical desires are assuaged, and they know by proof that they are in control of the most perfectly organised mechanism of comfort that was ever devised. Naught is forgotten, from the famous wines cooling a long age in the sub-basement, to the inanimate chauffeur in the dark, windy street, waiting and waiting till a curt whistle shall start him into assiduous life. They know that never an Oriental despot was better served than they. Here alone, and in the mansions of the enemy, has the true tradition of service been conserved. In comparison, the most select hotels and restaurants are a hurly-burly of crude socialism. The bell is under the hand, and the labelled menial stands with everlasting patience near; and home and women are far away. And the world is not.
Forgetting the platitudes of the war, they talk of things as they are. All the goodness of them comes to the surface, and all the weakness. They state their real ambitions and their real preferences. They narrate without reserve their secret grievances and disappointments. They are naked and unashamed. They demand sympathy, and they render it, in generous quantities. And while thus dissipating their energy, they honestly imagine that they are renewing it. The sense of reality gradually goes, and illusion reigns--the illusion that, after all, God is geometrically just, and that strength will be vouchsafed to them according to their need, and that they will receive the reward of perfect virtue.