"I don't take in that periodical," said I. "The omniscience of the
last copy I saw dismayed me. I couldn't understand why the
Government were such insensate fools as not to move from Downing
Street to their Editorial offices."

Randall, with a humouring smile, defended the Albemarle Review.

"It is run," said he, "by a little set of intellectuals--some men
up with me at Oxford--who must naturally have a clearer vision
than men who have been living for years in the yellow fog of party
politics."

He expounded the godlike wisdom of young Oxford at some length,
replying vividly to here and there a Socratic interpolation on my
part. After a while I began to grow irritated. His talk, like his
verse, seemed to deal with unrealities. It was a negation of
everything, save the intellectual. If he and his friends had been
in power, there would never have been a war; there never would
have been a German menace; the lamb would have lain down in peace,
outside the lion. He had an airy way of dismissing the ruder and
more human aspects of the war. Said I:--

"Anyone can talk of what might have been. But that's all over and
done with. We're up against the tough proposition of the present.
What are you doing for it?"

He waved a hand. "That's just the point. The present doesn't
matter--not in the wide conception of things. It is the past and
the future that count. The present is mere fluidity."