What interests me most on looking back now at those ten years is the loyalty, devotion and fidelity which we showed to one another and the pleasure which we derived from friendships that could not have survived a week had they been accompanied by gossip, mocking, or any personal pettiness.  Most of us had a depth of feeling and moral and religious ambition which are entirely lacking in the clever young men and women of to-day.  Our after-dinner games were healthier and more inspiring than theirs.  “Breaking the news,” for instance, was an entertainment that had a certain vogue among the younger generation before the war.  It consisted of two people acting together and conveying to their audience various ways in which they would receive the news of the sudden death of a friend or a relation and was considered extraordinarily funny; it would never have amused any of the Souls.  The modern habit of pursuing, detecting and exposing what was ridiculous in simple people and the unkind and irreverent manner in which slips were made material for epigram were unbearable to me.  This school of thought—­which the young group called “anticant”—­encouraged hard sayings and light doings, which would have profoundly shocked the most frivolous among us.  Brilliance of a certain kind may bring people together for amusement, but it will not keep them together for long; and the young, hard pre-war group that I am thinking of was short-lived.

The present Lord Curzon [Footnote:  Earl Curzon of Kedleston.] also drew the enemy’s fire and was probably more directly responsible for the name of the Souls than any one.

He was a conspicuous young man of ability, with a ready pen, a ready tongue, an excellent sense of humour in private life and intrepid social boldness.  He had appearance more than looks, a keen, lively face, with an expression of enamelled selfassurance.  Like every young man of exceptional promise, he was called a prig.  The word was so misapplied in those days that, had I been a clever young man, I should have felt no confidence in myself till the world had called me a prig.  He was a remarkably intelligent person in an exceptional generation.  He had ambition and—­what he claimed for himself in a brilliant description—­“middle-class method”; and he added to a kindly feeling for other people a warm corner for himself.  Some of my friends thought his contemporaries in the House of Commons, George Wyndham and Harry Cust, would go farther, as the former promised more originality and the latter was a finer scholar, but I always said—­and have a record of it in my earliest diaries—­that George Curzon would easily outstrip his rivals.  He had two incalculable advantages over them:  he was chronically industrious and self-sufficing; and, though Oriental in his ideas of colour and ceremony, with a poor sense of proportion, and a childish love of fine people, he was never self-indulgent.  He neither ate, drank nor smoked too much and left nothing to chance.