We weren’t all tied up, I may say, with the political party principles very commonly held by members of the 1917 Club.  I certainly wasn’t a Socialist, nor, wholly, I think, a Radical; neither at that time was Peacock, though he became more so as time went on; nor, certainly, was Katherine.  Juke was, because he believed that in these principles was the only hope for the world.  And the twins were, because the same principles were the only wear for the young intellectual, at that moment.  Johnny, in all things the glass of fashion and the mould of form, wore them as he wore his monocle, quite unconscious of his own reasons for both.  But it was the idea of the Anti-Potter League to keep clear of parties and labels.  You can belong to a recognised political party and be an Anti-Potterite, for Potterism is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions (Juke was, after Katherine, the best Anti-Potterite I have known, though people did their best to spoil him), but it is easier, and more compatible with your objects, to be free to think what you like about everything.  Once you are tied up with a party, you can only avoid second-handedness, taking over views ready-made, if you are very strong-minded indeed.

Thursday was a fairly free afternoon for me, and Jane and I somehow got into a habit of going off somewhere together after lunch, or staying on at the club and talking.  Jane seemed to me to be increasingly interesting; she was acquiring new subtleties, complexities, and comprehensions, and shedding crudities.  She wrote better, too.  We took her stuff sometimes for the Fact.  At the same time, she seemed to me to be morally deteriorating, as people who grab and take things they oughtn’t to have always do deteriorate.  And she was trying all the time to square Hobart with the rest of her life, fitting him in, as it were, and he didn’t fit in.  I was interested to see what she was making of it all.

4

One Thursday in early September, when Juke and Jane and I had lunched alone together at the club, and Jane and I had gone off to some meeting afterwards, Juke dropped in on me in the evening after dinner.  He sat down and lit a pipe, then got up and walked about the room, and I knew he had something on his mind, but wasn’t going to help him out.  I felt hard and rather sore that evening.

Soon he said, in his soft, indifferent voice, ’Of course you’ll be angry at what I’m going to say.’

‘I think it probable,’ I replied, ‘from the look of you.  But go on.’

‘Well,’ he said quietly, ’I don’t think these Thursday lunches will do any more.’

‘For you?’ I asked.

‘For any of us.  Not with Jane Hobart there.’  He wouldn’t look at me, but stood by the window looking out at Gray’s Inn Road.

‘And why not with Jane?  Because she’s married to the enemy?’

‘It makes it awkward,’ he murmured.