“Yes. I’ve been thinking of that for some time,” said Eric, half to himself. “Though I’m not a soldier... It’s all right if he himself has changed with the world around him; in peace the individual moves more quickly than the mass, but in war the mass moves more quickly than the individual.”
He stroked his chin thoughtfully and looked up to find the woman opposite him leaning forward with a faint air of diffidence and a question in embryo.
“There’s no old life for women to take up, is there?” she asked, plucking up courage, but evidently disconcerted by the clear ascendancy of her own voice.
“Woman is unchanging,” Eric answered, “she resigns herself to civilization, but she has never been civilized. Man is, to her, a physiological incident and a domestic accessory, so that a war only affects woman by withdrawing so many potential fathers of her children and supporters of her house.”
He glanced covertly at the plan of the table and found opposite his own name that of Lady Woodstock. Sir Matthew Woodstock, three chairs away, was a partner in Woodstock, McArthur and Company and had been sent to America by the Ministry of Munitions as British representative on the Purchasing and Priority Council.
To right and left rose an eager debate on sex and conduct. Eric had thrown them a bait which, he knew well, few men and no woman could resist. An “academic” discussion of sex enabled them to talk about themselves, to indulge their own sex-curiosity, to fancy themselves wholesomely fearless and unprejudiced; it enabled him to dine peacefully in the soothing haze of sham-intellectuality and to study anew the names on the table-plan. Next to Carstairs he saw Mrs. O’Rane deep in conversation with John Gaymer; next to him was Lady John, with O’Rane on her other side. It was indeed no great exaggeration to say that there were more British officials than Americans in New York; and the sight of this compact alien colony set Eric thinking about his speech. He was unlikely to enter the Plaza again, but he could not spend a week in London without meeting O’Rane or Gaymer; his valediction should be something for them to remember and quote when he had slipped through their hands into a retirement from which, this time, there would be no return... He was roused by the touch of a woman’s hand on his sleeve. Finding him unoccupied, his neighbour was asking him to sign her _menu_. Instantly her example was followed by every one who saw him writing; _menus_ were passed from hand to hand, waiters appeared from other tables with piled-up trays; he was still signing when Nelson Millbank whispered a question and stood up to propose the toast of the evening.