I brightened.  This was the old Delancey.  The Delancey of the Saturday Evening Post and the Strand, of the taffetas curtains and the cottage in Devonshire.  By my sudden glow of gladness I realised how much I had missed him.  But I couldn’t say, “Dear, dear Delancey, please be your old self and never, never, whatever you do, write another ‘good’ book,” so I confessed that a question mark would look very nice, but that I still thought that “Whither” sounded rather like a religious tract.

“Well, we must think it over,” he said.

A week later, he announced to me in a tone which indicated clearly that my opinion was only wanted if it was approval, “I have decided to call my book ‘Transition.’”

“I always like single word titles,” I said.

“No one will read it,” he said.  “One bares one’s soul to the public and they throw stones at it.  But at any rate, now I can hold my head high.”

I didn’t laugh, but it was the effort of a lifetime.  Dear Delancey was so very absurd as a self-made martyr.  It was somehow impossible for him to give an impression of having been persecuted for righteousness’ sake.  His shiny, rosy face had never looked rounder, his trousers had never been more perfect or his shoes more polished.  And there were still the same little outbursts of childish prosperity, his watch, his tie-pin, his links were all redolent of a vitality that had ever been just the least little bit blatant.

“Delancey,” I said, “I want you to have just the sort of success you want for yourself.”

“Thank you,” he said, wondering if I knew what I was talking about.

And then, one day, a proof copy of Delancey’s book arrived.  I looked at the paper cover.  It was bright orange with “Transition” slanting upwards in immense black letters.  “Very arresting,” I could hear the publisher saying.  Gingerly I unwrapped it.  Underneath, it was sober black linen, with bright blue lettering still on the cross.  I sat with it in my hands, feeling limp and will-less.  But, at last, I pulled myself together.  I read the dedication, “To those who died.”  I saw that there were 600 pages, big pages crowded with words.  And then, saying to myself, “It is no good putting it off,” I began to read.  Delancey’s book was certainly not at all like his stories.  It was very nearly rather a good book and it was quite extraordinarily dull.  The social structure played a role of deadly relentless magnitude.  It began (before the War) as an immense iron scaffolding and ended sprawling in the foreground, torn up by the roots.  In the clutches of this gigantic monster, the two chief characters not unnaturally reduced by comparison with their surroundings to the proportion of pygmies in their turn, worked from happiness to the self-conscious misery which is the only true state of grace.