His uncle shook a dissenting head.  On this subject he permitted himself mild discussion, but his voice was still that of an old, wearied man, annoyed and bewildered.  “Oh, no!” he said.  “That’s the very feature of it that seems to me most dreadful; the vermicular aspect; the massed uprising; the massed death.  About professional armies there was something decent—­about professional killing.  It was cold-blooded and keen, anyway.  But this modern war, and this modern craze for self-revelation!  Naked!  Why, these books—­the young men kept their fingers on the pulses of their reactions.  It isn’t clean; it makes the individual cheap.  War is a dreadful thing; it should be as hidden as murder.”  He sat back, smiled.  “We seem to have a persistent tendency to become serious to-night,” he remarked.

Serious!  Adrian saw a vision of the drill-grounds, and smiled sardonically; then he raised his head in surprise, for the new butler had broken all the rules of the household and was summoning his uncle to the telephone in the midst of dessert.  He awaited the expected rebuke, but it did not come.  Instead, his uncle paused in the middle of a sentence, stared, and looked up.  “Ah, yes!” he said, and arose from his chair.  “Forgive me, Adrian, I will be back shortly.”  He walked with a new, just noticeable, infirmness toward the door.  Once there he seemed to think an apology necessary, for he turned and spoke with absent-minded courtesy.

“You may not have heard,” he said, “but Mrs. Denby is seriously ill.  Her nurse gives me constant bulletins over the telephone.”

Adrian started to his feet, then sat down again.  “But—­” he stuttered—­“but—­is it as bad as all that?”

“I am afraid,” said his uncle gently, “it could not be worse.”  The curtain fell behind him.

Adrian picked up his fork and began to stir gently the melting ice on the plate before him, but his eyes were fixed on the wall opposite, where, across the shining table, from a mellow gold frame, a portrait of his grandfather smiled with a benignity, utterly belying his traditional character, into the shadows above the candles.  But Adrian was not thinking of his grandfather just then, he was thinking of his uncle—­and Mrs. Denby.  What in the world——!  Dangerously ill, and yet here had been his uncle able to go through with—­not entirely calmly, to be sure; Adrian remembered the lack of attention, the broken eye-glasses; and yet, still able to go through with, not obviously shaken, this monthly farce; this dinner that in reality mocked all the real meaning of blood-relationship.  Good Lord!  To Adrian’s modern mind, impatient and courageous, the situation was preposterous, grotesque.  He himself would have broken through to the woman he loved, were she seriously ill, if all the city was cordoned to keep him back.  What could it mean?  Entire selfishness on his uncle’s part?  Surely not that!  That was too inhuman!  Adrian was willing to grant