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 rôle 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.

"I have chosen a man and a woman, neither of them in any way
exceptional," wrote Delancey in the preface and though this was
undoubtedly so, they seemed to me truer to fiction than to life. No, the
merits of the book had nothing to do with the characters, they lay in
the descriptions of the English countryside, of village life, of London
traffic, of the Armistice, of an Albert Hall meeting. There was a close
observation of detail and that pictorial sense which is Delancey's one
gift and which he relentlessly suppressed whenever he could,
nevertheless forced its way out here and there. The canvas seemed to me
immense. Politicians and preachers, workers and capitalists, artists and
philistines, "good" women and prostitutes, soldiers and conscientious