It had been an ugly, debasing episode, and had dragged on and on, as such episodes have a way of doing.
Wrenching his mind free of that odious memory, he looked across at Betty.
Yes, it was at once a relief and something of a disappointment to feel her, too, transformed into a stranger.

For one thing she had had, when he had last seen her, a great deal of long fair hair.

But she had cut it off when starting her arduous war work, and the lack of it altered her amazingly, all the more that she did not wear her short hair "bobbed," in what had become the prevailing fashion, but brushed back from her low forehead, and staidly held in place by a broad, black, snood-like ribbon.
He looked to his right, down the old-fashioned, almost square dining table.

Jack was the least changed, after his father, of the young people sitting at this table.

Jack, nine years ago, had been a rather complacent boy, doing very well at school, the type of boy who is as if marked out by fate to do well in life.