What a remarkable novella. I've never run across any mention of it that I can remember, yet it surely stands with other, more celebrated works of the time. It's a perfect companion to _The Good Soldier_ and _Jacob's Room_, for starters. And _In Our Time_, too, in a way. It's the narrator who makes it astonishing: a peripheral first-person who is free to reveal her own flaws and shallowness even as she transforms and matures beyond those initial limitations. Indirectly but clearly, it's an indictment of World War I and of the fading but still powerful snobbery and paternalism of the British class system. It reaches back to Romanticism in its rapturous evocations of the landscape (British writing of the 19th century has always made me imagine that the countryside of that island must be the most gorgeous in the world), but the Edenic cannot save the soldier whose experience has ruined him into the 20th century.