Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/42

 "Readjusted?" she repeated, looking at him interrogatingly.

"In France," he said. "We all had time to think out there."

She nodded understandingly.

"I suppose it was being pitchforked clean out of our environment," continued Beresford, "and making hay with class distinctions. I went out from the Foreign Office. For some weeks I was a private; it was a revelation."

"Yes," she said dreamily, "I suppose we all felt it."

"You see out there the navvy for the first time in his life asked himself why he was a navvy."

"And the man from the Foreign Office why he was a man from the Foreign Office," she suggested.

"Yes," he smiled, "and I doubt if either was successful in framing a satisfactory answer. Everything was one vast note of interrogation. A new riddle had been propounded to us."

"And you came back looking for an Œdipus [sic]."

"Yes," he assented. "I on the open road, others in the workshop and office. The politician knows nothing about reconstruction, because he can view it only from the material standpoint."

She nodded her head brightly in agreement. "No one seems to understand. Everything's so mixed up."

"I suppose it's because until the war no one ever had a chance of finding out anything about any but his own class. Over there the labourer found the