Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/247

 promise that had given hope in life to lonely girlhood. There was a New Rich, but there was also a New Poor, and people on small fixed incomes or with little nest-eggs of capital, on which they scraped out life, found themselves reduced to desperate straits by the soaring of prices and the burden of taxation. Underneath the surface joy of a victorious people there was bitterness to which Victory was a mockery, and a haggard grief at the cost of war in precious blood. But the bitterness smouldered without any flame of passion, and grief nagged at people's hearts silently.

Many of the men who came back were in a strange mood: restless, morbid, neurotic. Their own people did not understand them. They could not understand themselves. They had hated war, most of them, but this peace seemed flat and unprofitable to their souls. All purpose and meaning seemed suddenly to have gone out of life. Perhaps it was the narrowness of English home-life. Men who had travelled to far places of the world, who had seen the ways of foreign people, and had been part of a great drama, found themselves back again in a little house closed in and isolated by the traditions of English individualism, so that often the next-door neighbour is a stranger. They had a sense of being suffocated. They could not stay indoors with the old pleasure in a pipe, or a book by the fireside, or a chat with mother or wife. Often they would wander out on the chance of meeting some of the "old pals," or after a heavy sigh say, "Oh, God! let's go to a theatre or a 'movie' show!" The theatres were crammed with men seeking distraction, yet bored with their pleasures and relapsing into a deeper moodiness afterwards. Wives complained that their husbands had "changed." Their characters had hardened and their tempers were frayed so that they were strangely irritable, and given to