WORLD'S END

As in Paris, all the smart forms of play had been resumed with a rush. A horde of people had got money, and the newspapers assured them that the way to help the poor was to spend it fast. Benevolent souls, they labored hard to do their duty. They acquired new outfits of costly clothing, thus making work for seamstresses and tailors; they motored to the racetracks, thus making work for jockeys and trainers, for salesmen and chauffeurs of automobiles; they swarmed into the expensive restaurants, ordered lavishly, and tipped the waiters generously. To assist their efforts were shows and pageants, balls and festivals, events with historic names - "Wimbledon" and "Henley," a "Peace Ascot" and a "Victory Derby," a Cowes regatta coming for the first time in six years. There would be no "Courts," but there were six Royal Garden Parties at Buckingham Palace, gay and delightful affairs at which the ladies were forbidden to wear dйcolletй in the afternoons. In the days of Jane Austen it would have been proper, but the present Queen considered female arms and bosoms improper until after sundown.

Pearls were the gems of the day, and fashions were "anarchical"; dresses might be anything so long as skirts were short and waistlines nonexistent. Capes had come back; they were pleated, and large at the waist - built in imitation of barrels, so Margy Petries declared. The keynote of a day costume was plumes; not the curled ones, but lancer plumes, glycerined plumes, plume fringes, plume cascades, plume rosettes. Because of the great number of gas cases, which healed slowly if ever, many entertainments were given and costumes worn for the benefit of the crowded hospitals.

Lanny missed his mother, or some girl to enjoy the society game with him. He persuaded Nina and Rick to motor to town, and put them up at the hotel, and took them to see the Russian dancers - not Bolsheviks, but good, old-time Russians, doing La Boutique Fantasque, enacting can-can dancing dolls. Nina managed to persuade her husband to forget his pride and look at the spring exhibition of art from a wheel-chair. Lanny, having read what the critics had said in Paris, was able to talk instructively about the relative merits of the two displays. Altogether he managed to pass the time agreeably, until one day his father said: "I have to go to Paris for a while."

"That's on my way home!" answered Lanny.

37

Peace in Our Time

I

THE day that Lanny and his father arrived in France was the last day of the last extension of time allowed to the Germans, to say whether or not they were going to accept the terms imposed upon them. At least so the Allies declared, and at each of their outposts, fifty kilometers beyond the Rhine bridgeheads, their motorized columns were packed up and ready to start. They were going to advance thirty-five miles per day into Germany, so it was announced; and meanwhile in every drawing room and bistro in France the leading topic of discussion was: Will they sign or won't they?

An Austrian peace delegation had come, and a Bulgarian one, and were submitting with good grace to having their feathers pulled out while they were still alive. Not a squawk from them; but the Germans had been keeping up a God-awful clamor for six or seven weeks; all over their country mass meetings of protest, and Clemenceau remarking in one of his answers that apparently they had not yet realized that they had lost a war. Their delegation was kept inside their stockade and told that it was for their safety, some of them, traveling back and forth to Germany, were stoned, and for this Clemenceau made the one apology of his career.

The Social-Democrats were ruling the beaten country. It was supposed to have been a revolution, but a polite and discreet one which had left the nobility all their estates and the capitalists all their industries. It was, so Steffens and Herron had explained to Lanny, a political, not an economic revolution. A Socialist police chief was obligingly putting down the Reds in Berlin, and for this the Allies might have been grateful but didn't seem to be. Stef said they couldn't afford to let a Socialist government succeed at anything; it would have a bad effect upon the workers in the Allied lands. It was a time of confusion, when great numbers of people didn't know just what they wanted, or if they did they took measures which got them something else.