The old woman in Lancaster Gate had not been capable either of talking or thinking about herself, except as a fretful animal with certain simple bodily wants.  In Helena, Lucy Friend had for the first time come cross the type of which the world is now full—­men and women, but especially women, who have no use any longer for the reticence of the past, who desire to know all they possibly can about themselves, their own thoughts and sensations, their own peculiarities and powers, all of which are endlessly interesting to them; and especially to the intellectual elite among them.  Already, before the war, the younger generation, which was to meet the brunt of it, was an introspective, a psychological generation.  And the great war has made it doubly introspective, and doubly absorbed in itself.  The mere perpetual strain on the individual consciousness, under the rush of strange events, has developed men and women abnormally.

Only now it is not an introspection, or a psychology, which writes journals or autobiography.  It is an introspection which talks; a psychology which chatters, of all things small and great; asking its Socratic way through all the questions of the moment, the most trivial, and the most tremendous.

Coolness, an absence of the old tremors and misgivings that used especially to haunt the female breast in the days of Miss Austen, is a leading mark of the new type.  So that Mrs. Friend need not have been astonished to find Helena meeting her guardian next morning at breakfast as though nothing had happened.  He, like a man of the world, took his cue immediately from her, and the conversation—­whether it ran on the return of Karsavina to the Russian Ballet, or the success of “Abraham Lincoln”; or the prospects of the Peace, or merely the weddings and buryings of certain common acquaintances which appeared in the morning’s Times—­was so free and merry, that Mrs. Friend began soon to feel her anxieties of the night dropping away, to enjoy the little luxuries of the breakfast table, and the pleasant outlook on the park, of the high, faded, and yet stately room.

“What a charming view!” she said to Lord Buntingford, when they rose from breakfast, and she made her way to the open window, while Helena was still deep in the papers.

“You think so?” he said indifferently, standing beside her.  “I’m afraid I prefer London.  But now on another matter—­Do you mind taking up your duties instanter?”

“Please—­please let me!” she said, turning eagerly to him.

“Well—­there is a cook-housekeeper somewhere—­who, I believe, expects orders.  Do you mind giving them?  Please do not look so alarmed!  It is the simplest matter in the world.  You will appear to give orders.  In reality Mrs. Mawson will have everything cut and dried, and you will not dare to alter a thing.  But she expects you or me to pretend.  And I should be greatly relieved if you would do the pretending?”