Yes:  Honoria was happy then, as indeed she had been during most of her life, except when her brother died and her mother died.  What did she lack for happiness?  Nothing that this world can give in the opening twentieth century ... not even a very good pianola or a motor.  I feel somehow it was almost unfair (in my rage at the inequality of treatment meted out by the Powers Beyond).  Shall not General Sir Petworth Armstrong die in the great debacle of the world-wide War?  I shall see, later.  And yet I feel that this nucleus of pure happiness housed in Kensington Square—­or at Petworth Manor—­was to the little world that revolved round the Armstrongs like a good radiator in a cold house.  It warmed many a chilly nature into fructification; it healed many a scar, it brightened many a humble life, like that of Bertie Adams’s hard-working, washerwoman mother, or the game-keeper’s crippled child at Petworth or the newest, suburbanest little employe of Fraser and Claridge’s huge establishment in the Brompton Road.  It pulled straight the wayward life of some young subaltern, about to come a cropper, but who after a talk or two with that jolly Mrs. Armstrong took quite a different course and made a decent marriage.  It conjoined with many of the social activities for good of one who might have been her twin sister—­Suzanne Feenix—­only that Suzanne was twenty years older and perhaps an inch or two shorter.  Dear woman!  My remembrance flashes a kiss to your astral cheek—­which in reality I should never have dared to salute, so great was my awe of Colonel Armstrong’s muscles—­as, at any reasonable time before or after the birth of your last child in June, 1910, you stand in the hall of your sunny, eighteenth century house, with the gold and green glint of the Kensington garden behind you:  saying with your glad eyes and bonny mouth “Come to our Suffrage Party? Such a lark!  We’ve got Mrs. Pankhurst here and the Police daren’t raid us; they’re so afraid of ‘Army.’  Of course he’s away, but he knows perfectly well what I’m doing.  He’s quite given in.  Now Michael, you show Sir Harry and Lady Johnston to the front seats...”

(I looked round for the rather gloomy presence of Michael Rossiter, but it was his little golden-haired god-son she meant.)

You shall have your general back safe from the wars, with a wound that gives only honour, a reasonable number of well-earned decorations, and a reputation for rather better strategy than Aldershot generally produces; and he shall live out his wholesome life alongside yours, still dispensing happiness, even under a Labour Government:  till, as Burton used to wind up his Arabian Nights love stories, “there came to them the Destroyer of delight and the Sunderer of societies.”