‘My dear,’ it began. ‘I couldn’t look at you when you smiled – did you notice?’

Confirmed in his guess that it was a love letter and without the slightest feeling that he ought not to be reading it – on the contrary congratulating himself on having removed it from the waste-paper basket rather than let it lie about with the other rubbish where anyone might see it (the kitchen maid for instance was a very silly girl) – he read on. ‘There is a certain smile you have which I cannot meet – not because it dazzles me, thought it is dazzling – but because it is so innocent. It’s as if you didn’t know how much I love you, how much – for it must be so – you love me, or are going to love me. It’s not for nothing – how could it be? – that all those ordinary hesitancies which veil people from one another were never there between us. From the first we looked at each other from heart to heart – oh how we looked – “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears And true plain hearts do in the faces rest.” We may be talking about anything – trivialities, gossip, reading – or it may be one of those other times when suddenly we say so easily things that really matter to us – but always we look. I have never known anyone whose eyes I could meet in the way I meet yours. Isn’t there another Donne poem where he has a line “And while our souls negotiate there”? Well, when we look at each other our souls are negotiating. And it’s only when you look at me as if you didn’t know, when you give me that sweet warm friendly smile you give so many people, and which is so beautiful it hurts and so kind I want to cry, that I have to look away. It’s not for me that smile. I know too much.

‘I was rather shaken anyway by what you had just been saying – about war and so on – because of course you are right and I adore your rightness and yet – and yet – there’s a kind of inevitability about the other thing. If there were to be a war I should want to fight in it. I don’t suppose it will come. People say something must happen about Ireland; other people say the militaristic regime in Germany is going to insist on a trial of strength sooner or later. On the other hand we’ve had two or three crises in the last few years which have blown over and come to nothing. Who knows? I can’t say I positively want a war; and yet one gets a feeling sometimes – life is so extraordinarily pleasant for those of us who are fortunate enough to have been born in the right place – ought it to be so pleasant? – and for so few of us? And isn’t there sometimes a kind of satiety about it all – and at the same time greed? We seem to have become money-mad – there’s never been so much gambling, speculating, fortune-hunting – yet were we not all educated to be heroes (Roman ones at that)? Supposing it did come, some great trial, might it not cleanse us of our materialism, our cynicism, our lax lazy hypocrisies, make us gird our sinews and find simplicity again? And then should we not be fitter afterwards to make a better world? For that we must be what we are here for, to leave the world a better place than we found it.