The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly enclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.

This was a wonderful first novel, one written before the Armistice and yet it exhibited some carelessness. This otherwise ebullient story of a shell shocked story unable to remember his wife or the last fifteen years instead longs for an earlier entanglement -- with a prole. How much description is applied (read wasted) to working class woman, her lack of fashion, her dingy home, her inability to maintain a youthful freshness. How ghastly!. Why do such people have to spoil everything? Can't they stay in their tenements?