CHAPTER IV.
Mrs.Friend passed a somewhat wakeful night after the scene in which Helena Pitstone had bestowed her first confidences on her new companion.
For Lucy Friend the experience had been unprecedented and agitating.

She had lived in a world where men and women do not talk much about themselves, and as a rule instinctively avoid thinking much about themselves, as a habit tending to something they call "morbid." This at least had been the tone in her parents' house.

The old woman in Lancaster Gate had not been capable either of talking or thinking about herself, except as a fretful animal with certain simple bodily wants.

In Helena, Lucy Friend had for the first time come cross the type of which the world is now full--men and women, but especially women, who have no use any longer for the reticence of the past, who desire to know all they possibly can about themselves, their own thoughts and sensations, their own peculiarities and powers, all of which are endlessly interesting to them; and especially to the intellectual _elite_ among them.

Already, before the war, the younger generation, which was to meet the brunt of it, was an introspective, a psychological generation.