I

I left Oxford with a sense of oppressive loneliness.

It was not entirely the sorrow of parting from a place I had for four years loved but too well; it was not altogether the prospect of making a fresh start—I was pleasurably excited by that; the feeling of forlornness arose, I think, from the recognition that the next step would have to be taken alone. I suppose I am shy; certainly I lack initiative. There had hitherto always been someone to keep me in countenance—Loring at my private school, at Melton and, later, at Oxford, and there had always been someone to act as a stimulus. At one time it was Burgess, who laid the foundation of any knowledge I have gleaned, and made me as temperate, passionless and sterile as I have become—as deeply imbued, perhaps, with the indifference that masquerades as toleration.

At another time I was stirred from philosophic doubt by the fanaticism of O'Rane. The fire he lit burned too brightly to last, but by strange irony as it began to flicker I came under the influence of my guardian Bertrand Oakleigh, a man so disillusioned that in very factiousness of opposition I was driven to fan the dying embers of my young enthusiasms. My intimate acquaintance with him began in the autumn of 1904, some fifteen months after I had come down. In the interval I must admit to a feeling of intellectual homelessness.

The last moments of the Oxford phase came at the end of July after six weeks in Ireland with my mother. I returned to London and picked up Loring, and the two of us presented ourselves for our vivÂs. There was little worthy of record in my own case. A fat-faced man in a B.D. hood opened at random the Index and Epitome to the Dictionary of National Biography, turned the leaves, shut the book with a snap and called my name. For perhaps six minutes I drew on my imagination for the early life of the Young Pretender; then in an oily, well-fed voice my examiner remarked, "Thank you. That will do." I disliked the voice, I disliked the man. He is probably a bishop now.

When my own ordeal was over I strolled round the Schools to see how the Greats men were getting on. To my delight I found Loring in the middle of his viv—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the viv was in progress, for I have no idea when it started. Maradick of Corpus was examining, and everyone seemed to be enjoying himself. The candidate was leaning back with his chair tilted at an angle and his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat; so far as a lay man could judge he was making out an effective case against the Pragmatism of William James, of which, by an appropriate coincidence, Maradick was regarded as one of the greatest living exponents. The scornful demolition went on unchecked until Loring introduced some such name as MÜsseldorf.

"Who?" interrupted Maradick.

"MÜsseldorf. Johan MÜsseldorf of NÜrnburg. Died about 1830. It's his 'Prolegomena' I'm quoting. He exploded Pragmatism before James was born."

"Exploded? Well, er ... that's as may be. I remember now you mentioned him in one of your papers. He's not very well known in this country."

"I don't know about this country," Loring rejoined. "He's shamefully neglected in this university. Yet he undoubtedly anticipated Schopenhauer on Will. Or if you look at Lincke's 'Note on Berkeley's Subjective Idealism'...."

"Lincke, did you say?" inquired another of the examiners.

The remainder of that viv has passed into history, and when I went up to take my M.A. three years later the story was told me of three different people. On the last day of the written work, Loring had expressed dissatisfaction with his papers, and I heard later that when he began his viv the examiners regarded him as a hopeless, unsalvageable third. They asked formal questions, and he replied by burlesquing such of their lecture theories as he had picked up at second hand. It was by pure chance that he mentioned MÜsseldorf, but the awe of unfamiliarity with which the name was received led him to try experiments with the mass of mid-nineteenth century metaphysics that for two years I had seen him reading in the window-seats of "93D" or reciting of an evening to a restless Siamese kitten.

I arrived in time to see the three examiners taking counsel together, while Loring looked on with the good-natured tolerance of a man who is prepared to give up his whole day in a good cause.

"We think, my colleagues and I," said Maradick at length, "that this discussion had better be continued in another room. Perhaps you will come this way with me? We should like to hear you more fully on this subject, but of course there are other candidates to consider."

I have only Loring's unchecked, picturesque narrative of what took place during the next hour, as I was not sure whether the public was admitted to this private, auricular examination.

"They'll give me a first on that," he predicted, as we walked up the High together. "Bound to! Oh, it was one of our better vivÂs! I hauled out every German philosopher I'd ever heard of, and a fair sprinkling that I made up on the spot, carefully adding an outline of their work and pointing out where they differed from our esteemed old friend Lincke. Maradick don't know much about modern German metaphysics, and he knows a dam' sight less about the German language. I quoted long passages to establish my points, and when I couldn't think of any to suit, I just made 'em up! I'd no idea my German was so fluent. If they don't give me a first, I'll expose Maradick for pretending to recognize quotations from two non-existent authors named Frischmann and Reichwald respectively." He led the way to the station with an obvious sense of a good day's work done.

I imagine that every man, before he attains wisdom, endures a part or the whole of a walking tour. O'Rane had propounded the idea in the course of our last term, and his eloquence was sufficient to shake even Loring. On leaving Oxford we repaired to House of Steynes, where Raney was awaiting us with a haversack and ash-plant, and without giving our enthusiasm a chance to cool we struck south with no more destination nor time-limit than was implied in the determination to walk until we quarrelled or grew tired of walking. It is a tribute to our friendship that three weeks later we reached Loring Castle, Chepstow, unsundered and harmonious.

There was, I suppose, too much variety for us to grow weary of each other's society. Marching without map or time-table, we billeted ourselves for the night on any friend we encountered on the way, and when none was available we put up at the first hotel that promised adequate bathing accommodation. Our kit was not immoderate—brushes, razors, sponges and pyjamas. When we needed clean clothes we bought them, and got rid of the old through the parcels post. This last was the only matter of disagreement between us, for Loring professed an overwhelming desire to heap unwelcome gifts on the unsuspecting men who chanced to be in the public eye at the moment.

"I've walked clean through these boots," I remember his remarking one night at Windermere, as I yawned through an attack on the current Education Bill in a fiery local organ. "George, d'you think your friend Dr. Clifford would like some capital brown bootings? Or Lord Hugh Cecil?" He seized the paper from my hands and turned the pages thoughtfully. "Eugene Sandow! That does it! Why, it may be his birthday to-morrow for all you know!" And it was only by concerted physical force that we restrained him.

The result of our Schools reached us at Shrewsbury: Loring had got a first and I a second.

"It's one in the eye for dear old Burgess," he remarked, when we congratulated him. "I shall go down to Melton next term and ask for an extra half, just to score him off. And now I really can take things easily."

"Why don't you stand for a fellowship?" I asked. I remembered his dread of leaving Oxford and found it in my heart to envy him his chance of living on and off in—say All Souls for another half-dozen years.

"Why in God's name should I?" he demanded. "I've satisfied myself, and anyone else who's interested in the subject, that I've got some ability. Now the only artistic thing is to waste it. There's no distinction in belonging to an effete aristocracy unless people can be induced to think you're being thrown away. I'm going to be a Dreadful Object Lesson."

He leaned back in his chair, yawned and sat with closed eyes until we roused him.

"Seriously, what are you going to do?" O'Rane inquired.

Loring adopted the manner of a Hyde Park orator.

"Live abroad," he said, "and squander the rents that I wring from the necessitous poor. Come back in time to shoot the birds or hunt the foxes that have overrun my tenants' land. Go down to the House once every few years to vote against democratic measures. Marry an actress of questionable virtue and die, leaving a son who has only to take the trouble to be born in order to become an hereditary legislator and a permanent obstacle to the People's Will. It'll be very hard work, but someone must do it, or Drury Lane and the Liberal Publication Department would have to close down. That's what's expected of tenth transmitters of foolish faces, isn't it, George?"

"It's the least you can do," I assured him.

"And the most. That's the sad part about it." His face grew reflective and his voice lost its note of banter. "Time was when I hugged delusions and called them ideals. I used to think there was room in the body politic for men who were rich enough and high placed enough to be quite independent of party considerations,—men who could wait and take long views, men without seats to lose or constituents to bother about, men who couldn't be bought because there was nothing big enough to offer them. The enormous majority of M.P.'s go into politics for what they can get out of them—legal jobs, office, local honour and glory—and it gets worse every time another poor man is elected. They can't afford to wait, these poor men; therefore they can hold no independent view; therefore they'll accept any dam', dirty, dishonest shift their leaders may suggest. And so public life gets more sordid every day."

I suggested that with all its faults our English public life was still ethically the cleanest in the world and was so far from consistently deteriorating that it was still some way above eighteenth-century England. If he found it corrupt it was for him to raise it to his ideal.

"My dear George," he answered, "the ideal perished on the day I discovered Unionists and Radicals both talking of 'big views' and 'the higher patriotism' and at the same time helping themselves out of the public purse. No, no! Suave mari magno. I shall endeavor not to marry the actress of questionable virtue, but I shan't attempt to etherialize politics. They're too dirty, for one thing, and they're too dam' dull for another."

He might have added that they were too uncertain. In twenty years' tolerably close observation it is the unexpected changes of politics that impress me most—the big Bills that evoke none of the expected opposition, the little Bills that break Ministries, the inflation or sudden pricking of a reputation, the constant shifting and re-arranging of parties. Ten days after Loring's criticism of politics on the score of their dullness, the three of us were at Chepstow waiting for the weather to mend before pushing on to London. The Khaki Parliament does not rank high among periods of consummate human dignity; its birth was overshadowed and embarrassed by the South African War; its early and middle life were given over to Education and Licensing Bills of which I imagine even their authors were not unduly proud. Then without warning came the news that Chamberlain had declared for Mercantilism, Protection, Fair-Trade—whatever name was dug out of the economy primers before the movement was baptized with the name of Tariff Reform.

The Unionist party divided, prominent Ministers left the Cabinet and a battle royal raged between "Free Fooders" and "Whole Hoggers," while the Tariff Commission scoured the business centres of the kingdom in search of evidence to support the Chamberlain indictment. To the layman it seemed as if Mr. Balfour's continued tenure of office could be counted by weeks, and as "General Election" came back to men's lips, political interest revived throughout the country and there arose a lust for Social Reform only comparable to the famous summer weeks of the French National Convention.

My interest in politics, long confined to sterile criticism of the Education and Licensing Acts enlivened by fierce denunciation of the Government's indentured labour in South Africa, became of a sudden constructive, vital and effective. Returning to town in October I took rooms in King Street, St. James's and resuscitated the Thursday Club. The Government had a wonderful knack of shamming death and never dying, and in 1903 we seemed within a month or two of dissolution. A comprehensive programme was needed, and speaking for Youth, Liberalism, Oxford, we rushed into print with our "Thursday Essays."

I can see now that there was little originality in the book. Half-unconsciously we hearkened to the voices that were murmuring round about us and, with the impetuosity of youth, always went one better than anyone else, including, at a late date, the official programme-mongers headed by the new Liberal Prime Minister at the Albert Hall. Campbell-Bannerman might postpone the settlement of Ireland, but we were not so faint-hearted; Mr. Birrell might plead for Simple Bible Teaching as a solution of the religious education difficulty, we boldly declared for secularism, and so throughout our six or eight chapters.

Glancing at the old "Essays" with their Oxford omniscience and glittering epigram, their logic—and faith in logic, their assurance and perfervidity, I feel very old or very young, I am not sure which. We Liberal Leaguers of 1903 were to have so strange a history in the next ten years. The old Radicalism of Boer War days, the Peace-Retrenchment-and-Reform Radicalism was, in 1903, hardly respectable: we thought as "imperially" as the truest Chamberlain stalwart. Dilke, with his "Greater Britain," was our pattern Radical statesman, and the Federation of the Empire took place of honour in our manifesto. By a curious irony the 1906 election was too successful: there were too many Noncomformists seeking to recast Education and Suppress Beer, too many Labour men with visions of expensive Social Reform. The Liberal League—most gentlemanly of parties—was captured; its leaders retained their positions of command by undertaking to push other people's Bills. Not till the Great War broke out did they come to their own again.

Dilke was our model abroad, but, when the vociferous, Radico-Labour-Nonconformist majority demanded Social Reform and a new heaven and earth, we were constrained to seek fresh guidance. We found it in the Webb handbooks for bureaucrats. With their stupendous mastery of detail, their analysis and classification, their prescriptions for every variety of social ill, they were an incomparable vade-mecum for legislators in a hurry. They appealed to the lazy man and the Oxford mind. I remember my relief some years later in reading "The Break-up of the Poor Law," for unemployment had never seemed easy till I found the industrial population divided by percentages, ticketed and mobilized, ultimately pressed into penal colonies in the case of recalcitrancy. I had a perfect scheme cooked, eaten and digested for the Labour man who demanded unemployment legislation and the silly-season correspondent who inquired in general terms whether the unemployed were not really the unemployable. The Webb influence was paramount in the meetings of the Thursday Club, and in our essays on Social Reform I trace a Webb-derived mechanical conception of the State, a lust for sweeping legislation, a disregard for mere flesh and blood and a growing reliance on governmental control and coercion.

Our book was produced in 1904, but I did not wait to assist at its publication. In the autumn of 1903 my eyesight—never strong—underwent one of its eclipses, and my doctor ordered me a sea-voyage. For a year I wandered round the world, still full enough of the Dilke ideal to make special study of British colonies and possessions abroad. I went alone, because Loring, one of the few acceptable companions with money and leisure to spare, answered my invitation in Dr. Johnson's words: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail: for being in a ship is being in jail with a chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." The Daintons, however, who were wintering in Cairo, travelled with me as far as Alexandria.

A couple of days before we started I went down to Crowley Court to join them. Tom, who had lately bought himself a small car, motored his brother and O'Rane over from Oxford, to say good-bye. They returned the same evening, but in their brief visit there was time for an embarrassing upheaval. I noticed that Lady Dainton was rather flushed and ill at ease during luncheon, and in the course of the afternoon O'Rane gave me the reason.

"She's a damned, interfering meddler!" he burst out, with no other introduction to the subject. "Lady Dainton, of course, who else? She had the cheek to tell me she didn't like my writing to Sonia so much."

"What's her objection?" I asked.

"Oh, Sonia's too young, and speaking as her mother—my God, I thought that ullage was kept for penny novelettes! The girl of the present day.... Well, the long and the short of it was—I didn't mean to—but I told her Sonia and I were engaged. That gave her something to think about, George."

He strode fiercely across the lawn with his hands clasped Napoleonically behind his back.

"What did she say?" I asked, hurrying to overtake him.

"Wouldn't hear of it, don't you know?" he answered mimickingly. "We were a pair of children, don't you know? I'd behaved scandalously in mentioning such a thing, it was monstrous; what had I got to support her on? It was all her fault for ever letting Sonia go to Oxford, young men were not to be trusted, and after the years she'd known me, don't you know?" He blew a long breath. "She couldn't have said much more if we'd eloped."

"Well, what's going to happen now?"

He flung his hands out in wild gesticulation, and his black eyes were round and hot with angry surprise.

"She declined to recognize the engagement and told me I was to consider it off," he said. "I told her I proposed to marry Sonia. 'That is for us to decide!'" He clutched my arm and marched me the length of the lawn. "George, she's getting damnably pompous since they made Dainton a bart. We seemed to have reached a bit of an impasse. 'I don't recognize even an understanding,' she said, 'and I shall not permit Sonia to do so. If you persist in this—nonsense, my husband and I shall have to consider whether it is advisable for you and Sonia to have any opportunities of meeting, don't you know? If you will take my advice....' Pah! And then she handed it out. I must think of my career, I was a mere boy; you needed to be married to appreciate that marriage was an expensive luxury...."

"You seem to have taken it in the neck, Raney," I said as he choked and grew silent in his disgust.

"Pretty fairly. I'm not to write. I'm honour-bound not to mention the subject to Sonia on pain of having the door shut in my face next time. 'Of course, we shouldn't like that. You're an old friend. Perhaps if you had sisters of your own, don't you know. She started to get patronizing, George, so I asked her to tell me whether she admitted me to the house because I was fit to be admitted, or out of pity because I hadn't a home of my own and was a bastard——"

At the risk of writing myself down old-fashioned and conventional, I admit there are two or three words that send a shiver through me.

"My dear Raney ...!" I began.

He laid a hand on my arm.

"You can't improve on what she said, old man," he assured me.

"Call a spade 'a spade' by all means," I said, "but not 'a bloody shovel.' Especially with women. They have to pretend to be shocked."

He threw up his head with a mirthless laugh.

"There was devilish little pretence about Lady Dainton. It wasn't a word I ought to have used, and apparently it wasn't a thing I ought to have been. I suppose—she hadn't—heard about it before." He stood silent for many moments. "I asked her whether my presence was still acceptable. Of course she was bound ... did it very nicely, all the same. She said I was as welcome as before last June."

He took out a pipe and began filling it. I have met few men to whom the trite metaphor of "blowing off steam" was so applicable.

"Was that all?" I asked.

"I told her I regarded myself as being still engaged to Sonia." His eyes suddenly blazed and his voice rose. "And that I'd marry her if the whole world was in our way. Children indeed! Does she think there's some fixed age for falling in love?" Again he blew a long breath. "She said she couldn't be responsible for what I chose to fancy about myself, but that I knew her views. There the row ended."

There was a subdued leave-taking that night, and for some days the gloom spread by Lady Dainton seemed to hang round her house and family. For all my wisdom and superiority in discussing the rash engagement with Amy Loring, I was sorry to see it broken off. Two, three years before I had been as anxious as O'Rane to marry and I do not know that a disappointment hurts less at eighteen than later in life. It is true that there was no pecuniary embarrassment in my case, but at that age I refused to regard it as a serious obstacle in O'Rane's path. If anyone wanted money, he either manoeuvred himself into a job or put his shoulders to the wheel and made it. The one course, I then fondly believed, was as delightfully simple as the other. In few words, Lady Dainton was entirely wrong and O'Rane entirely right.

I carried that opinion with me to Cairo and beyond. The days of our passage out were days in which Sonia would come on deck in the morning rather white of face and waterily bright of eye. By night, as we strolled aft and looked out over the creaming wake, I would try to invent little consoling speeches and tell her of men who had amassed fortunes almost in an hour; and she—at sixteen and a half—would gaze across the gulf that separated her from one-and-twenty. On that day she would marry him if she married beggary with him, though beggary was but so much rhetoric on her lips. O'Rane's future, as they had mapped it out together a dozen times, included two things that stood out above the rest—the revival of the title that had died with his father and a fortune wherewith to restore his father's estate. From so determined a republican no less could be expected.

The month I spent in Cairo made me doubtful whether Raney had not met his match in Lady Dainton. Even conceding the practicability of her daughter's generous assumptions, I doubted whether fair time would be granted for their maturing. Lady Dainton's ambition carried her far and fast; she was now, after five years' assiduity, reckoned unhesitatingly as of county family; a like assiduity directed on London would, in another five years, leave no house unstormed. I know no one outside an Oscar Wilde play who talked so persistently of the difference between those who were "in Society" and the others who were not. I studied her method—and was astonished by its simplicity. She engaged a good suite at Shepheard's, aware beforehand of the class of visitors she was likely to meet there; by perseverance and an agreeable manner she succeeded in getting to know all who—in her own phrase—were "worth knowing"; and with the aid of an undeniable flair for organization she made up other people's minds for them and tirelessly arranged expeditions and parties. (It was curiously like the "Pinkerton's Hebdomadary Picnics" of "The Wrecker.") And on her return to England there started a paper-chase of invitations, beginning, "I hope you are not one of the people who think friendships abroad should be forgotten at home, like some dreadful indiscretion...."

I left Cairo with the feeling that Lady Dainton, were her circumstances ever reduced, would always be worth bed, board and a retaining-fee for a Lunn and Perowne Pleasure Cruise.

I also thought that David O'Rane, undergraduate, must cut an insignificant figure in her dominating eyes.

II

The world would be appreciably less unbearable if men and women could travel abroad without describing their travels on their return.

After the absence of a year, in which I made my way from London through Africa, India, Australia to South America and back again through the States, Japan, China and Russia, I am free to admit that I sinned frequently and soliloquized interminably to men who neither knew nor wished to hear about the countries I had visited. I was very young at the time, and that must be my excuse. Greater age, and my sufferings at the hands of others, will now restrain my pen and limit me to a single reminiscence.

On my way home in the late summer of 1904 I broke the journey at Paris to stay with Johnny Carstairs, who was now—after a truncated career at Oxford—established as an honorary attachÉ at the Embassy. I never visit Paris without turning into the Luxembourg to see what Whistlers are on view and this time, as I came out into the Gardens, I saw Draycott. He looked shabby and unshaven, but not more so than any conscientious English student in the Quartier Latin, and at no time since he exchanged the extreme of foppery for the extreme of Bohemianism had a frayed shirt or porous boots seemed valid reason in his eyes for cutting a friend.

"The reason?" Carstairs echoed, when we met for dÉjeuner in the CafÉ d'Harcourt. "I know it, of course, but——"

Three months of diplomacy had left Carstairs responsible and enigmatic.

"Don't be professional," I said.

"I'm not free to say," he answered. "You may take it he left his country for his country's good, and, if he goes back, click!" He made the gesture of handcuffs snapping over his wrists.

I made no comment. Since that day I should be sorry to count up the number of men who have gambolled a longer or shorter distance on Draycott's road. They have waylaid me at the House or Club, sometimes on the quayside at Calais—threadbare, furtive and spirituous, even at ten in the morning. They have all been offered the opening of a lifetime and need but twenty pounds for their outfit; and they have all accepted half a crown with gratitude, and most have returned unblushingly once a week until the day when they were met with blank refusal. Draycott's case was the first of my experience—and the most complete.

After four-and-twenty hours in London I crossed to Ireland and joined my mother and sister in Kerry. Our meeting was in the nature of a conseille de famille, to decide what we were going to do and where we were going to do it. Health and the habit of years mapped out my mother's course for her—the Riviera for the winter, Italy for the spring and Lake House, County Kerry, for the summer and autumn. It was a placid but tolerable programme, and Beryl, who had left school two months before, adopted it eagerly. My mother then came to the remaining and unanswerable question:

"What about you, George?"

As so often with men of weak initiative, the question—with a little judicious delay—was answered for me. My uncle and former guardian wrote from an address in the County Clare, inviting himself to come for an indefinite period and shoot an unstated number of snipe with me. My mother, who secretly feared and openly resented Bertrand's overbearing manner and restlessly critical tongue, sighed—and accepted her fate. He arrived grumbling at the eight-mile drive, and in the course of ten days left not one stone upon another. The food, the beds, the hours, the shooting—there was nothing too great or too small for his exasperating notice—Beryl was twice reduced to tears, and my mother developed questionable headaches and a taste for lying hours at a time in her room. At heart Bertrand was one of the kindest men I have ever met, but his humour was of the Johnsonian, sledgehammer type, to be met with methods of equal brutality or treated with passive indifference. On the whole I was well treated. For one thing, I seldom have the energy to lose my temper; for another, he had been responsible for me during the greater part of my sentient life, so that, when he poured scorn on English public schools and universities, I could point out that I went to Melton and Oxford at his bidding.

"And so now you've written a book," he growled one night after dinner. "What d'you want to do that for?"

"Money," I said "'No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.'"

"H'm. You won't make money out of that kind of book."

"Then you've read it?" I said.

Bertrand knocked the ash from his cigar and thought out a disparaging answer.

"Oh, I looked at it," he said vaguely. "It's unequal. Some parts worse than others."

"It was written by several people," I explained.

"Which part was your handiwork?"

"Which did you think the worst?" I asked in turn.

My uncle looked at me suspiciously.

"You're not proud of your precious babe," he observed.

"The opportunity would be too irresistible for you if I were."

Then he laughed, and with that laugh was born the friendship of many years. It was a pity, he felt, that a young man should bury himself in the dreariest house of the dampest county of the damnedst island in the world. Why should I not come to London, see a little of politics and society, 'try it on the dog, so to say'—which by amplification meant testing the principles of "Thursday Essays" on a popular meeting? If, as a good, catholic hater, there was one thing he hated more than another, it was writing letters: why should I not sign on as his secretary? Though untrained, I should learn much, and anyone with enough superfluous energy to rush into print could handle his correspondence before breakfast.

"Rather you than me, George," said my mother when I discussed the proposal with her. "You won't find it easy...." But I had heard something of Bertrand Oakleigh's house in Princes Gardens and was not unwilling to endure discomfort in establishing myself there.

"I shall be delighted to come, Uncle Bertrand," I told him.

"For God's sake, don't call me 'uncle,'" he growled. And with an afterthought that seemed lacking in logic, "I'm not your nurse, you know."

So in the autumn of 1904 I crossed from Ireland, sublet my rooms in King Street and set myself to study secretarial deportment and the ways and character of Bertrand. At this time he was within a few months of seventy, massively built, with massive forehead, and, I think, a massive brain behind it. A wealthy bachelor, with powerful digestion and love of rich food, good wine and strong cigars, he entertained prodigally and had all the admiration of Regency days for a creditable trencherman. (My father rather offended him by dying young, and he looked askance at my shortness of sight and weakness of heart, as though the great-nephew were about to complete the disgrace initiated by the nephew.) In his boorishness and courtesy, his healthy animalism and encyclopÆdic intellect, his hatred of society and insistence on living in it, he was to me a perplexing bundle of anomalies.

Some sides of his character—his disillusionment, independence and far-reaching capacity for verbal hatred—were attributable to early struggles and later disappointments. After leaving Trinity College he saw fit to quarrel with his father and, spending his last shilling in getting to London, he picked up a living from the gutters of Fleet Street, first as a reporter and then on the editorial staff of a since-defunct paper. While still working with one hand at journalism, he saved enough money to get called to the Bar and collected a rough-and-tumble practice from solicitors of the kind that sooner or later get struck off the Rolls. Eventually he took silk and became respectable, and from the Bar to the House of Commons was a short and well-trodden road.

Older members will still recall the Dilke-Chamberlain group below the gangway: Bertrand turned to it as a compass needle swings to the magnetic north. In '80 he was too young to expect preferment, but after the split I believe he was sounded on the subject of the Solicitor-Generalship. With characteristic perversity he affronted Mr. Gladstone by refusing "the indignity of knighthood" and in consequence remained for thirty years a private member, the leader in 'caves' and critic of governments, a formidable opponent but a terrifying ally, with a mordant tongue, a confounding knowledge of procedure and—I am afraid—a love of mischief-making for its own sake.

His hates were chiefly of interest to the persons hated and are far too numerous to set out. It could hardly be otherwise in the case of a man who seemed to acquire scandal intuitively. Knowing him as I now do, I should be reluctant to send any boy of four-and-twenty to live in daily communion with him; for though, like all professional cynics, he came in time to be disregarded, it is of doubtful good for any young man to see the world in quite the condition of corruption in which Bertrand depicted it. Jews and Scots, Tories and Nonconformists, lawyers and humanitarians, he hated them by classes: within the Radical core his antagonism was directed both against the men who lagged behind and those who raced beyond the insular individualism by which alone salvation could come. I always felt that were a guillotine ever set up near the Houses of Parliament, he would—by his own standards of justice—be the sole survivor.

Hide the fireworks or disperse the spectators, and he was another man. His antipathies were so far from being reciprocated that Princes Gardens was a political Delphi. His judgement and knowledge of men were good enough for Ministers to consult him on appointments, chiefly—by some curious irony—ecclesiastical preferment, and it is not too much to say that he never tripped. I always imagine that he stirred a busy finger in the concoction of Honour Lists, though this part of the correspondence he kept to himself.

Birthday and New Year Honours, however, played a small part. Land Valuation Leagues submitted him their propaganda, Disarmament Societies asked how far it would be safe to oppose a vote, and I have known very highly placed officials to consult him on points of party management. His own description of himself was sometimes "a party boss," sometimes "an extra Whip" and usually "the official unpaid corrupter of the Liberal party." This last phrase seldom failed to drop from his lips at the end of a big political dinner when he, after being corrupted by the flattery of a Minister, in turn corrupted conscientious objectors at the rate of nine courses and a bottle of Louis Roederer per man.

I soon ceased to wonder at my uncle's objection to sending out invitations in his own hand. For luncheon he kept open house, and any man might come to seek or offer advice and continue coming till a more than ordinarily brutal insult convinced him that his presence was no longer welcome; it was at a dinner that his formal entertaining displayed itself. On Mondays we had "these damned official Liberals"—candidates and members; ex-Ministers and leaders of dissentient minorities; ecstatic, white-hot Nonconformist pastors and worried party journalists trying to reconcile the two-and-seventy jarring sects into which Liberalism split after the Chesterfield speech. Bertrand would glower at them, individually and in bulk, but, as the shrill, earnest voices rose and mingled, I could see his eyes travelling from time-server to intransigeant, as though his fingers were on the pulse of the whole unwieldy, centrifugal party. And when he had looked longer than usual at a man, he would wander round the table and murmur casually, "Stay behind for another cigar when the Bulls of Bashan have gone."

The Thursday dinners and the guests invited to them were marked in his book with a D—which stood for Duty, Dull or Damnable, according to his temper.

"I have to do it, George," he explained, with a half apologetic headshake. "For fifty years I've dined with them, and they must come and dine with me. If I refused to meet 'em ..." He shrugged his shoulders. "All my time would be taken up inventing excuses. Take my tip and dine out on Thursdays. I'll put you up for the Eclectic. Don't miss Saturday, though. The Saturday dinners are sometimes quite amusing."

In ten years I do not believe I missed a single Saturday dinner and for reward I think I have met what Lady Dainton would call "everybody worth meeting" in Bohemian, artistic, un-Social London. Looking round the long table at the authors and musicians, the returned travellers and soldiers on leave from a forgotten fringe of Empire, I was always reminded of a well-attended dinner of the Savage Club. You were invited—not for what you were, but for what you had done or because you could talk; and Bertrand in black tie and short jacket radiated a new urbanity over the gathering. We dined soon after eight and sat talking into the early morning. About midnight a sprinkling of actors and Sunday journalists would drop in for sandwiches, champagne and cigars. If there were vocalists or composers, the piano was dragged in from the morning-room; I used to hear a good deal of poetry recited before or in lieu of publication, and, whenever Carden, the "Wicked World" cartoonist, was with us, he would sit with one leg thrown across the other, his cigar at an acute angle and a spiral of blue smoke curling into his eyes, while he covered the backs of the mÉnus with caricatures in charcoal. I have a drawer full of them somewhere—Trevor-Grenfell who penetrated the Himalayas by a new pass, Woodman as 'Lord Arthur' in "Eleventh Hour Repentance," Milhanovitch at the piano and a dozen more.

Failing professional talent, my uncle would be called on to make sport. The only men I know who eclipsed him in memory were Burgess and O'Rane, and he had lived so long in London, hearing and storing the gossip of every hour, that it was almost impossible to find him at fault. That he was a stimulating talker, experimenting in talk and taking risks in conversation, I judge from the eagerness of his guests to get him started, and—to put the same test in other words—by the keen competition to secure invitations for a Saturday dinner. I remember a Thursday night when Loring came and wrestled with Bertrand over the official Catholic attitude towards Modernism. I met him in the street a few weeks later, and he begged me to congratulate him.

"What's happened?" I asked.

"You ought to know," he answered. "It came in your fist. I've been asked for a Saturday."

And Loring was in small things the least enthusiastic of men.

My secretarial duties took no more than an hour or two a day, and at the beginning of 1905 I followed my uncle's advice and put some of my political formulÆ to practical test by going down three or four times a week to Wensley Hall Settlement in Shadwell. The impulse came from Baxter-Whittingham, who wrote to remind me of "our pleasant talks at Oxford" and to say that not a man could be spared with the working classes in their present scandalous condition of neglect. Thirty per cent of my generation worked for longer or shorter periods in one or other of the university and college missions: my seniors, laid by the heels in the slumming epidemic of the eighties and nineties, were there before me, and my juniors continued the supposedly good work after my defection. I therefore speak with misgiving and a sense of personal unworthiness in confessing that East End mission work left me singularly and embarrassingly cold. From some lukewarmness of spirit I failed to catch the enthusiasm which made my fellows dedicate their lives to the work and allowed them all to drop it when a dawning practice or the design of matrimony laid more pressing claim to their leisure. Bertrand indeed, indulged a favourite form of disparagement as soon as I made my intention known to him.

"I've been through all that," he told me. "It's all right; you'll outgrow it."

And I outgrew it in some ten weeks. Others have told me they made lasting and unique friendships. Such good fortune did not come my way. I doubted, and still doubt, the possibility of friendship between a Shadwell stevedore and the angular, repellent product of an English public school and university; this is not to put one above the other, but merely to disbelieve the existence of a common intellectual currency. Further, I am too self-conscious to run a Boys' Club or play billiards with the men without a sense of unreality and a fear of being thought patronizing. I question my own moral and social right, moreover, to conduct raids into the houses of Thames watermen and, if anyone seek to justify such mission work as I found in progress at Wensley Hall on the ground that it showed rich and poor how the other lived, it is mere platitude to answer that the poor revealed to me as little of their normal life as I to them of mine. Throughout my time in Shadwell I felt like a bogus curate at an endless choir treat.

And, if in looking back on it all I do not wholly regret the weeks I spent there, it is because of my consciously earnest and religiously hearty fellow-workers in the mission field. Chief of them in 1905 was Baxter-Whittingham, or simply "Baxter," as he was known to all Shadwell but myself, sometimes scholar of Lincoln and a man ten years my senior, who had gone from Oxford to the East End and never returned. It was the fashion at Wensley Hall to regard Whittingham as a Latter-Day Saint (I use the phrase in its unspecialized sense, without reference to the school of Brigham Young); and I am ready to believe that in thirty per cent of his character Whittingham was entirely saintly. Admiring disciples told me how he lived in a single room of a workman's cottage on fifteen shillings a week with a supererogatory fast thrown in on any colourable pretext. The first thirty per cent of him compassionately and whole-heartedly loved the poor. Another twenty per cent was given up to an emotionalism bordering on sensuality in ritual, music and art.

And the remaining fifty per cent of Baxter-Whittingham was pure arrivisme. He had risen early and cornered the market in poverty; there was no one to equal him on East End Housing Problems, the Drink Question, Sweating and the Minimum Wage. His little "Other Half of London" and "England's Shame" created a considerable sensation and were accepted without criticism. Indeed, who was in a position to criticize the man who knew Shadwell and had lived there ten years? When the disciples prevailed on him to stand in the 1906 election his candidature aroused an interest that spread far beyond the limits of his division. And when he was returned a party was waiting, ready made, in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. Ministers might shake their heads irritably over another Incorruptible, but many a private member felt easier in his mind for the presence of the hollow-cheeked, thin-lipped figure in the loose-fitting, semi-clerical clothes, who seemed to carry England's poor in one pocket and England's conscience in another.

I left Wensley Hall at the beginning of the 1905 Season, lured by cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. Early in April I met John Ashwell at a dinner-dance given by the Sinclairs: he casually elicited my name and address, satisfied himself of my bona fides and went to work like an industrious, dapper, well-fed little mole. Within a week strange cards arrived for me without explanation, within a month they had assumed the dimensions of a moderate snowstorm.

"Who is Mr. John Ashwell?" I asked my uncle one morning, throwing over a card bearing his compliments.

"A Society promoter," Bertrand answered. "D'you know Lady Ullswater? Those two have started a registry office for eligible young men." He handed back the card. "Your name's on the books. He sends lists of dancing men to struggling hostesses at so many guineas a dozen. Lady Ullswater brings girls out at a hundred pounds a head, with another fifty pounds if there's a presentation; for three hundred pounds and all expenses—a couple of thousand in all, say—she'll give a ball at the Empire Hotel. 'Lady of Title willing to chaperone young girls of good family. Introductions.' You've seen her advertisements—every spring for the last fifteen years. Ashwell takes a commission on any suitable match he brings off in a girl's first season. Don't cherish too many illusions about London Society, George; anybody can get there who's willing to pay. And unless you're particularly anxious to be married off to someone you don't know, I should advise you to avoid Ashwell. A year or two ago I heard him with my own ears tell a woman that he'd got a man he wanted her daughter to meet—heir to a viscounty and a good deal of money; only an uncle in the way, and he was a bad life. Of course if you feel you're immune, the pander to plutocracy is as amusing to study as anyone else."

Bertrand's description was not of a kind to send me out of my way in search of Ashwell, but in the course of nine years I saw as much of him as I wanted to. Of an artificial society he was, perhaps, the most artificial member.

III

Failing to learn much of working class conditions at first hand, I decided to reform them from the distant security of Westminster.

It was a few weeks after my apostasy from the Wensley Hall Settlement that I asked my uncle what steps he advised me to take in order to get myself elected to the House of Commons. "Thursday Essays" seemed to have committed me to a political career, and faithful reading of the party press had put my mind in a fine ferment over the immorality of the Unionist handling of Education, Licensing and Indentured Labour. Moreover, like most of those who had learned their political economy from Mill, I was intellectually offended that the dead heresy of Protection should be dragged from the grave it shared with Bi-metallism and galvanized into life. And I suffered all the fierce irritation of the impatient idealist at sight of a lethargic Government slumbering in office and barring the path of hurrying academic reformers. I felt that much must be swept away and much more built up. I had nailed on the public doors my theses of Federation, Land Reform, Franchise Adjustment, Single-Chamber Government and the rest. The offer of the Viceroyalty of India would not have kept me from the House.

"Want to stand?" Bertrand echoed. "My dear boy, you'll outgrow that phase."

"But the hopeless chaos!" I protested. "We've become an Imperial people, an industrial nation, and we're still trying to run with an obsolete machine."

"And—you—think—you—can—alter—it?" Paper and ink can never reproduce the cold scorn of his voice.

"I can have a dam' good try," I answered, with assurance.

Bertrand went to his writing-table and scribbled a note.

"Take this to Abingdon Street," he said, handing it to me. "You'll find you're more than welcome these hard times. I should go there on foot," he added gloomily—"along Knightsbridge and through the Park, where you can see the trees and hear the birds singing. London has its charms in the season, George. And you're a dancing man, aren't you?"

I admitted the charge.

"You'll soon outgrow that," he hastened to add, as though repentant of having found one good thing in life. "Well, chacun À son goÛt. But you'd find, if you came to the Gallery once or twice...."

"Is there any phase in life I shan't outgrow, Bertrand?" I asked.

He selected a cigar, pinched it, lit it and blew a cloud of smoke.

"No," he answered at length.

"And what happens at the end of it all?"

"You die."

"Well, what keeps you going? What phase are you in?"

He stared out of the window at the stream of hansoms and omnibuses rolling in a double line east and west.

"The great spectacle of life," he replied, with a wave of the hand. "You see it rather well from the House or the Club. That reminds me, I'd better put your name down. Come and lunch there to-day, and I'll show you the place. Yes, the great movement of men. I'm not tired of that yet. But you've got ideals, you're going to do things, you aren't content to sit and watch—and that's why I'm warning you against the House. There you'll only find jobs and disappointed men and backbiting and a spirit of compromise. However, you wouldn't believe me though I rose from the dead to tell you; a man has to find these things out for himself. You'd better tell the Whips who you are."

I walked down to the Central Office reflecting that Bertrand, to judge by his tone, had perhaps not yet quite escaped the phase of idealism.

His forecast of my reception was accurate enough. There were seats to fight in borough and county, north and south, east and west. I could have my choice, and with a year-book open on my knee I made comparative tables of the majorities against me. In the course of the interview there was diplomatic skirmishing on both sides as the Central Office reconnoitered to find out how much I was prepared to put down, and I tried to ascertain how far the Party Funds would help me. In consideration of a sum I was not willing to furnish, I could have the reversion of a safe seat in a mining area; at the other end of the scale, the Whips would pay all expenses if I would consent to break my shins on the five thousand Unionist majority in South St. Vincent's. Eventually, I undertook to pay my own expenses and fight the Cranborne division of Wiltshire, where there was a hostile majority of one thousand eight hundred. Then I jumped into a hansom and joined my uncle for luncheon at the Eclectic Club.

"The charm of this place," exclaimed Bertrand as he led me up the great staircase, "is that once you're a member you can be sure of meeting most of the men you want to and all the ones you don't. It's not political, so you find scallywags of all types. That's why it's called the Eclectic."

The great, grimy, eighteenth-century building—Hamilton's finest work, I always think—is too well known to need description, and anyone who has driven down Pall Mall or up St. James's Street is familiar with the line of bow-windows overlooking Marlborough House, and the row of choleric members who stare disgustedly at the street on wet days and revile the English climate. Within a few months I was privileged to take my place among them, and Bertrand spent an industrious week introducing me to the rules, conventions and personalities of the Club.

It was a rare opportunity for his favorite pastime of drawing indictments against professions. At one end of the dining-room he showed me a disillusioned close corporation of invertebrate Civil Servants, counting the days till they could abandon their judicious sterility and retire on a pension; at another, the corner where members of the Bar lunched hurriedly and discussed appointments. There was an embrasure traditionally reserved for peers and invariably raided by shy new members, and an elastic table by the fireplace where parliamentarians gathered to refight the battles of the House. The sharp division and mutual jealousy of the coteries reminded me strongly of Oxford, and, as election was in the hands of the whole Club, every ballot had the gambling excitement of a snap-division. If the Civil Servants supported a candidate too warmly, the Bar would rally, blackball in hand; the parliamentarians, on the other hand, held that a club was one thing and an almshouse for permanent officials quite another. And they voted in accordance with this reasoned conviction.

The ideal candidate was, of course, the unknown man with the unplaced backers; he might, indeed, be attacked on the rustic principle that the function of strangers is to have half-bricks heaved at them; or he might creep in unscathed, to the lasting mortification of men who would afterwards have liked to blackball him. Not once or twice have I heard the question, "How did he get in? I suppose I didn't know about him at the time, or I'd have pilled him like a shot."

"Is Adolf Erckmann a member?" I asked my uncle in a surprised whisper as we came upon a stumpy, bearded, scarlet-faced man breathing stertorously through thick lips and resting on the end of a sofa the reddest and most naked head it has ever been my fate to see.

"I don't think any Club is really complete without him," was Bertrand's guarded answer. "He represents so much."

In the last ten years Erckmann has come to represent considerably more than in 1905: his social development in those days had hardly begun, and outside the City his name was still comparatively unfamiliar. There, if you were a banker, you knew Erckmann Brothers of Frankfort, London and New York; in the Rubber Market you met Erckmann Irmaos of Para; and if you touched the South American chemical trade, it was long odds you bought from Erckmann Hermanos of Valparaiso. Moreover, it was difficult to deal in English real estate, South African diamonds, Norwegian timber or Alaskan furs without rubbing shoulders with Erckmann or the retinue of younger sons who picked up the tips and aspirates he let fall and in return allowed themselves to be seen dining with him or yawning through the exquisite musical parties he gave in Westbourne Terrace.

With his ceaseless activity and Midas touch he must have been worth a cool million even in 1905 when he was no more than forty and had been divorced but once. His wealth thereafter increased by geometrical progression, and slackening his attendance on business he turned his talents to society. The knighthood came in the Coronation Honours of 1911, the baronetcy two years later. There he stuck, for the second divorce brought him more notoriety than credit: the freeborn electors of Grindlesham, perhaps through inability to understand his speech, accepted his largess but rejected his candidature—twice in 1910 and once in the by-election of 1913; and just when the opening of the Cripples' Institute brought his name high again in the list of Government creditors the war broke out, and Sir Adolf—with all his raffish, lesser theatrical entourage—stumbled helplessly backward into his social underworld. He will, of course, re-emerge after the war, for his type is old as Ninevah or Tyre: Petronius wrote of the feast he gave under Nero, and Alcibiades probably dined with him before mutilating the HermÆ.

For want of a better landmark, Loring used sometimes to refer to our early years in London as "the days before one met Erckmann," and anyone who saw how he and his rowdy little circle dominated such houses as they entered will be grateful for the definition.

The summer of 1905, my first season, was undisturbed by him, though for two and a half months I danced, on an average, in eight houses a week. It may be that the future will find us too sober and too poor to revive the glories and excesses of those days, and in that case I am glad I grasped my opportunities while they lay within reach. As Bertrand predicted, I was to outgrow the phase, but, ere disillusion came with weariness, the life of those summer months was a long, unbroken dream. Now the men are mostly dead, the women widowed: the great houses are closed, the orchestras disbanded and bankrupt.

Yet for a moment at a time they still live. A hansom once more jingles through some Square to a striped awning and length of red carpet. Throwing the door open, Loring and I descend with our coats over our arms, press through the throng of interested idlers, give up our hats, pocket a ticket, pull on our gloves and warily squeeze our way past the couples on the stairs. I have forgotten half their names, but the faces are still familiar, and the little jargon of the ball-room shouted from the door to the whirling dancers. "You free any time? Missing two? Right! Many thanks. I suppose you're booked for supper? Well, sup with me—early and often." An odd bar of a forgotten waltz is enough to call the whole scene into life—the blues and whites and pinks of the dresses, the line of prim, weary chaperons round the walls, the lazy, stereotyped chatter, the drowsy scent of flowers, and the wonderful size and softness of the girls' tired eyes as daylight broke coldly into the yellow, stifling rooms.

There was a happy-go-lucky cameraderie about it all. An invitation once accepted left you a marked man. "Are you going to the Quentins' on Friday? Well, come with us! We've got one or two people dining first.... Eight-thirty. I don't know whether you got my name.... Oh, that was rather clever of you! I never listen myself. You'll find the address in the Red Book, and I'll push you along and introduce you to mother when she comes up from supper. Have you been selected for the Fortescues' next week? Then we shall meet there...."

And so from April to May, from May to June. I could stand late hours and ball champagne in those days, the whole of my world was treading the same round, and at twenty-four it was the rarest fun imaginable. Ten years later finds the ardour damped, but I should like to hear "The Choristers" played once more, I should like to dance again with Amy Loring, to see her brushing back the dark curl that always broke loose over her forehead, to talk again our tremendous trivialities. And I would give much to hear—say—Lady Pebbleridge's butler thundering out the names at Carteret Lodge—and to see the men stepping forward in response....

It was at the Pebbleridges' ball that I met the Daintons again. The house was small and the crowd was large. I had half decided to go on to the Marlores' in hopes of finding more room there when I discovered Lady Dainton and Sonia, pressed into a corner and pretending to enjoy themselves. Lady Pebbleridge had invited them as she invited all her Hampshire neighbours, but they were still strangers to London and knew no one. I acquired merit by finding the girl some partners, giving Lady Dainton an early supper and, when the room cleared, dancing with Sonia and trying to remove the bad impression which her first London ball had left on her. She had come on from the second Court and was looking far too attractive to be left standing in a corner; moreover, ever since our passage to Egypt the winter before, I had enlisted under her colours against her mother and felt it incumbent on me to provide such consolation as lay in my power.

Beyond the statement that she had not seen nor heard from O'Rane in eighteen months, I gleaned little information in the course of my second supper on the subject of her chequered romance. At third-hand she learned that Raney's vacations were spent in studying English Industrial conditions; he had put in time as an unskilled worker on the Clyde, as an extra harvest-hand in Wiltshire, and finally—though I never learned in what capacity—as a miner in the coal-fields of Nottinghamshire. What his purpose was, neither Sonia nor I pretended to guess; I judged from her tone that she was aggrieved at his experimenting in manual labour when by merely expressing the desire he could have secured an invitation to Crowley Court.

"Does your mother...." I began tentatively.

Sonia shrugged her pretty, white shoulders.

"She says he can come and stay with us if he wants to," she told me. "It looks as if he doesn't want to."

"I'm fairly sure that's not the reason," I said. "But he's a wild, eccentric creature—as you'll find when you're married to him."

Sonia drew on her gloves and picked up her fan.

"If I ever am," she said despondently.

I lit a cigarette and adopted a sage, mature tone.

"As soon as you two have got anything to marry on," I assured her, "your people will recognize the engagement."

"We're not even engaged any more. Mother told him.... As if I were a child!" She broke off, pushed her chair back and began to walk towards the door of the supper-room.

"Go on," I said as I followed her.

"Mother told him he'd—he'd behaved improperly in putting such ideas into my head. Putting such ideas! Mother won't see I've grown up. And then David got very angry and told her I might consider myself free of the engagement or not, just as I pleased. And he would never mention the subject till I did. George, I'm thoroughly depressed and, if I talk to you any longer, I shall say undutiful things."

A few weeks later I prevailed on Bertrand to invite the Daintons to dinner. He had met Lady Dainton on the Committee of the War Fund—an organization for the benefit of men permanently injured in the Transvaal; he had also taken an active dislike to her as he did to all bustling, capable women. She had joined the Committee one day and captured it the next. The meetings were held at the house which Sir Roger had taken for the season in Rutland Gate, and within a week there was an imposing programme of concerts, bazaars and charity performances. It is bare justice to Lady Dainton, who initiated and controlled the organization in its smallest detail, to say that the revenue of the Fund doubled in the six months following her accession to the Committee. I am not sure, however, that this was any recommendation in my uncle's eyes.

"He's a bore, and she's a snob," he declared. "Don't we know enough such without gratuitously adding to the number?"

"I am asking solely on the girl's account," I said.

"My dear George!"

The unaffected mistrust of his expression set me laughing.

"You needn't be anxious," I told him. "They're new-comers to London——"

"And want to nobble the place!" he growled. "I know the type, George. Climbing, climbing.... They're beer, aren't they. I dislike brewers."

"I don't suppose they'll ask you to buy any."

"More honest of them if they did. A brewer's bad, but a brewer who's ashamed of his brewing...."

"Are you going to invite them or are you not?" I interrupted.

Bertrand sighed like a furnace.

"Make it one of our Dull Evenings," he begged resignedly. "Really dull; wipe off all old scores. You can ask Ashwell, and Lady Ullswater, she'll be very helpful to them, and—oh, I'll leave it in your hands. Give me somebody tolerable on either side."

The dinner took place some weeks later in the early part of May and for a Thursday, and a designedly Dull Evening, was quite bearable. I took in Sonia and had Sally Farwell on my left; her mother, Lady Marlyn, went in with my uncle. I have forgotten how the others sorted themselves out, but conversation was maintained at an even flow, and no one seemed in an undue hurry to leave. And to Bertrand or any one trained by him to look dispassionately on at "the great movement of life," there was a quarter scene from the Human Comedy being played round his own table. The actors steadied to their pose as the butler cried their names. I observed that the Daintons had wasted no time since we met at Carteret Lodge: they were blasÉs and overdriven with the wearing life of Society.

"I've said I'd give a ball," sighed Lady Dainton. "Really ... dreadful fatigue, don't you know?"

And Lady Ullswater sidled up, shaking her wonderful head of perennially chestnut hair.

"Not if you go the right way about it, dear Lady Dainton. Of course, it's rather presumptuous of me to advise you, but...."

And in front of me, through me and over my head at dinner, Sonia and Sally Farwell bandied impressive names. With both of them it was the first Season, and each seemed to aim at showing the other—and me—the important figure she had succeeded in cutting. Sir Roger, always shy and more than ever out of his element, postured as the bluff Tory Squire who hated London and all its works. John Ashwell, who was the son of a highly respected North-country solicitor before he took to peddling names of eligible bachelors, shook his head over the plebeian admixture of society, illustrated by an account of that day's luncheon with the dowager Duchess of Flint. Even poor Lady Marlyn, who was stone-deaf, caught the infection of play-acting and pretended to hear and appreciate the dialect stories of the American attachÉ on her right.

I sometimes think life would be simpler and more sincere if we had an official "Who's Who" with our incomes, their source, our professions or public positions, our parents and other relatives, not excluding those who lived abroad, with the reason for their retirement. My uncle himself, who told the story of his proffered knighthood a thought too freely, would have been called the son of a middle-class farmer—but for the fact that Ireland boasts no middle class. My own estate owed its existence to the old penal laws against Catholics: less polished generations used to say it was acquired by apostasy from God and theft of a brother's birthright. I do not dispute the charge and am gradually restoring the stolen property in exchange for adequate compensation under the latest Land Purchase Scheme. If the facts were recorded in a form accessible to the public, there would have been added piquancy attaching to my "Justice for Ireland" speeches a few months later. But the mystery, romance and make-believe of social intercourse would have departed. And our one public virtue would drop out of play, for we should no longer indulge the kindliness of respecting our neighbours' susceptibilities.

As it was I had the ill-luck to offend Sonia. Despite the weariness she inspired in me with what the republican O'Rane would have called "upper-ten-shop," it was unintentional. I have always kept up a curiously frank, rather cynical and entirely honour-among-thieves friendship with her: we know each other to the marrow, and, while in ignorance of any quality other than common egotism that should attract anyone of her temperament to anyone of mine, I have never ceased to admire her on purely physical grounds. I am still content to sit as I sat beside her that evening, gazing at the heavy coils of her brown hair, the red, moist lips, the brown, rather wistful eyes and the singularly beautiful arms and shoulders gleaming white through the transparency of her sleeves. I can understand any man falling in love with her; I can understand any man wanting to live his whole life with her—for a month.

Offence came by Tony Crabtree. Ascertaining that I knew him, she invited my opinion, and with the sense of stumbling unexpectedly on a too rare opportunity, I told her all that I knew and much that I thought.

"He's a great friend of ours," she cut in disconcertingly when I paused for breath.

"He's a bad man, Sonia," I repeated.

"He's the best fun out," she insisted; "you don't know him."

"You know him well?"

"He dines with us about once a week; he's taking an awful lot of trouble over our ball. I wanted you to dine and meet him."

"I'll dine with pleasure——"

"I shall ask him too. He's always inquiring after you. I thought you were rather friends at Oxford."

"We never exchanged an angry word," I said. "I don't like him all the same, though."

Yet, when I dined in Rutland Gate the following week, Crabtree was there. The household indeed revolved round him, and the majesty of Lady Dainton was subjugated by the majesty of Crabtree. I was to meet him on and off for the next ten years: on one or two occasions there was unwelcome intimacy in our relations, and, though we have now drifted apart, I still see and wonder at his faculty of success. At Oxford he was primarily the man who cadged invitations, directed other people's parties and exploited a heartiness of manner and a certain social position in the university for what they were worth in cash or its equivalents. "A man always and everywhere on the make," was Loring's definition after meeting him on the Bullingdon. As a log-roller and picker-up of unconsidered meals, he had no equal, and his activity was characterized by the most frugal spirit. Though he dined with us three or four times, we never entered his rooms in Magdalen or Long Wall, and his mode of life was to live on a social aspirant for eight weeks and then propose the spoiled Egyptian for membership of the Club. The following term saw him billeted on a new victim. It was an arrangement that suited all parties save, perhaps, the Bullingdon.

I fancy he had considerably outlived his popularity by the time he went down, and in anyone else's hands the system would have gone to pieces in a year. My excuse for this digression must be a desire to emphasize the sufficiency of his brazenness and empressement of manner to put his critics out of countenance. I can see him now, with his big loose-limbed frame, his smooth face, and black hair carefully parted in the middle—dining at someone else's expense and constituting himself the life and soul of the party. In tearing spirits, yet never losing control of himself; drinking freely, but never drunk; open, but never candid; careless, but never off his guard—he was a disconcertingly cold and calculating man, clever and technically honest, though I would trust him no further than I could see him. After coming down he went to the Bar and pushed his way into a fair practice; several years later he married a widow rather older than himself, and, as his first public act was to appear as Conservative candidate in one of the Glasgow divisions, I infer that his wife had money. Immediately after the outbreak of war I found him hurrying through the Horse Guards in a staff captain's uniform. Though doubtful of his ability to "tell at sight a chassepot rifle from a javelin," I was in no way surprised.

His career is still young, and he has hardly aged at all since the night when I met him at dinner in Rutland Gate. I have no idea how long he had been known to the family, but it was pretty to see him slap Sir Roger on the back, to hear him call Sonia by her Christian name or address his host as "Dainton." He was prolific of suggestions for the forthcoming ball, drawn largely from experience of what was done by "my cousin Lord Beaumorris" at some period, I imagine, before that nobleman's second and latest bankruptcy.

By the end of the evening my dislike of him was no less, but it was diluted with a certain envious admiration.

IV

Social amenities make a petty thing of life, and from the loftiness of a time when our souls are supposed to be enlarged by war I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London. My uncle, who was ashamed of betraying enthusiasm, took mischievous delight in employing a low scale of values, and at five-and-twenty I fancied that to be cynical was to be mature. I trace a curious inability to distinguish the essentials of existence, and had anyone used such a phrase at that time I am sure I should have demanded rhetorically, "What are the essentials?"

Thus, Lady Dainton's first ball for Sonia was of little enough moment for men associated t?? e? ??? ??e?a, [Greek: tou eu zÊn enecha], and, in my eyes, the greatest of its many surprises was that I induced Bertrand to accompany me and stay out of his bed till after four. There was no merit in my own attendance. Sonia invited me verbally, her mother by means of a card eight inches by six; a week before the night panic descended on the family; they requisitioned their friends' lists, and I received three more cards with three sets of compliments, while on the day itself I was told by telephone that if I knew of one or two additional men I was to bring them punctually. So Bertrand, whose study of the great movement of men had never led him within the Empire Hotel, found himself incontinently deprived of his second cigar and packed into a cab on the stroke of ten-fifteen.

From the moment of our arrival I could prophesy success. Lady Dainton, I know, secured anticipatory and retaliatory invitations for Sonia; Lady Ullswater, who helped her to receive, reckoned up numbers and all they represented in her obscure finances; Ashwell wandered through the long rooms with an air of modest proprietorship, telling marchionesses of the balls he had left and duchesses of the balls he was going to. All the men obtained food, several of the girls obtained partners; and Dainton, who appeared five several persevering times in the supper-room, had the gratification of meeting at least one appreciative guest who observed, in the intervals of filling a capacious cigarette-case, "Dunno the merchant who's runnin' the show, but he does you pretty well, what?"

At ten-thirty the ball's fate lay still on the knees of the gods, but by eleven the rush had set in. I could see Sonia's face brightening, her eyes lighting up like the eyes of a political agent as he shepherds his stalwarts to the poll. Tall and short, dark and fair, stout and lean, they surged forward in an endless black and white stream, as desirable a set of young men as the combined talents of Ashwell and Lady Ullswater could bring together.

"She's launched!" said Bertrand, after an hour of the scene, and we walked upstairs in search of a cigar. By the buffet we found Dainton standing alone and drinking a surreptitious glass of champagne.

"Who does he remind you of?" my uncle asked me as we gained the lounge, and when I hesitated—"Don't you remember your Du Maurier?"

And then, of course, there leapt before my eyes the picture of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns's husband at one of Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns's parties: a jaded but unprotesting figure, leaning against the wall and dully blinking at his lady's social captures; heavy-eyed, drooping-jawed, with bulging shirt-front and necktie askew. One hand stifles a yawn, the other guardedly conceals the watch at which he is glancing with furtive resignation. Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, meanwhile, is rising from triumph to social triumph; he is paying the bill—and wondering wherein lies the fascination of it all.

As it was too crowded to dance and too early to sup, we took a couple of arm-chairs and ordered coffee. Overheated defaulters joined us from time to time, and Crabtree favoured us with his presence long enough to inquire: (i) how much I thought this touch was costing the old boy, (ii) what he would cut up for, (iii) what sort of place Crowley Court was, and (iv) whether I thought "The Trade" was likely to buck up at all.

"Who is your objectionable fat friend?" Bertrand asked when we were alone again.

"Objectionable—yes. Fat—yes. But no friend," I answered. "His name is Crabtree, and you are the only man in London whom he has not yet told that he is related to the intermittently bankrupt and always disreputable Lord Beaumorris."

"And he's running after this Dainton girl?"

"It's healthy exercise," I said, "and he hasn't run very far as yet."

"Well, well!" He sighed. "Marriage is a race in which the bookmaker invariably bolts with the money."

"What you want is some supper," I said.

"No, I want to watch the people a bit more. Who's the Greek god who just went by?"

"The man who waved?"

"Yes. Face all eyes."

"That was David O'Rane," I said.

My uncle made me repeat the name and then sat silently smoking for fully ten minutes. I thought he was falling asleep, but he suddenly roused himself to ask:

"What O'Rane is he?" and, when I had given a short account of my dealings with him for the last seven years, "Why the devil didn't you tell me you knew him?"

"I never imagined you'd even heard of his existence," I answered in some surprise.

"I hadn't. That's just it. George, I should like to meet the boy. No, no! Not now. When he's disengaged. He'll only think me an old bore, but I'm curious.... He's a very beautiful creature."

"And quite mad," I said. "If you won't accept my kind invitation to supper, I shall go down to find someone who will."

An hour later, with the consciousness that I had done nothing to justify my presence in the hotel, I sought out Sonia. A double line of claimants was closing in round one of the square, white pillars and towering over the shoulders of the rest I caught sight of Crabtree's sleek, black head. While Sonia stood breathless with excitement and bright-eyed with sheer joy of existence, he warded off the crowd like a policeman regulating traffic.

"Now then, Sonia, what about it?" I asked.

"Next but five," she called back, while Crabtree waved a large hand and boomed:

"Move along there, young feller, don't make a crowd!"

"The next is ours, isn't it, Miss Dainton?" inquired a decorous little voice from under my elbow.

"Time you were in bed, young 'un," Crabtree retorted menacingly.

O'Rane wormed his way past me and presented himself. In a moment's hush I heard the sharp tap of the leader's baton; for the last time Crabtree roared his wearisome "Move along there, please," and, as the music began, Sonia glided out on his arm into the middle of the room, barely turning to cry over her shoulder, "Come back later!"

"My duty's done, Raney," I said. "Come upstairs."

"I shall stay here a bit," he answered, following Sonia round the room with his eyes.

"Please yourself. You can't smoke here, and there's some old Green Chartreuse upstairs."

"Damn Green Chartreuse!" he returned.

"You shouldn't say that even in joke," I told him, as I started to elbow my way back to my old corner.

Bertrand I found was at supper, and our retreat had been invaded by a score of men who by rights ought to have been dancing. They were chiefly Tom's gladiatorial friends from Oriel, now scattering to various units of the Army—Penfold to the 17th Lancers, Moray to the Irish Guards and Kent to the Rifle Brigade. Of the others I knew Prendergast of Melton and New College, who was now a clerk in the Foreign Office and a purveyor of cheap mystery, and we were soon joined by Sinclair and Mayhew. Both were combining business with pleasure, for the former was playing for Yorkshire against the M. C. C. at Lord's, and the latter had hurried townwards to negotiate a position on the staff of "The Wicked World" as soon as his last Oxford term was over. Stragglers came and went, but our numbers remained steady and the group was completed by the arrival of Loring.

"This will never do!" he exclaimed. "Why aren't you chasing the hours with flying feet? Why aren't you letting joy be unconfined and all that sort of thing? Chartreuse? I can hardly believe it! Of course, if you insist.... Sinks, go and dance!"

"I've been cut," Sinclair returned contentedly.

"Faint heart never won fair lady. You said Chartreuse, didn't you? I like to make quite sure. You been cut too, George?"

"We've all been cut," I said.

Loring looked round and pointed an accusing finger at an immaculate, pale, fair-haired youth with sensational waistcoat buttons and a white gardenia. I knew him by sight, as the illustrated papers were always publishing his photographs in country-house groups, and the reviews alternated between describing his novels as "impossibly brilliant" and "brilliantly impossible."

"No woman born of woman has ever cut Valentine Arden," he said.

"One had three partners," Arden replied with dreamy detachment. "One could not do justice to them all. 'Solomon in all his wisdom ...' and they had hot red faces. He retired into himself and sat lost in contemplation of a smoke-ring till it wavered and burst.

"You're a contemptible lot," said Loring with scorn. "No more idea of duty ... oh, my Lord! here's Raney! Go and dance, you little beast!"

"I've been cut," O'Rane protested with an air of originality. "If you're so keen on duty...." He pointed to the tray of liqueur glasses. "And it's so fattening. Go and work it off, Jim."

Loring shook his head.

"I'm going home. I sat in that filthy House all the afternoon, dined with my uncle, whose port would disgrace a preaching friar, let alone a cardinal. I then attended a political crush, turned up here, talked to my host, gave my hostess supper, had two dances with my hostess's daughter...."

"You were favored," O'Rane observed.

"I was irresistible. So would any one have been after so much 1900 Perrier Jouet.... However, that's neither here nor there. I enjoyed those two dances, because I was the means of dislodging one Crabtree and seeing him packed off to feed dowagers."

"There's some value in a title yet," I said. "I tried and failed."

"How much of the Perrier Jouet ...? Half a bottle? No man, not even George Oakleigh, was irresistible on a beggarly half-bottle. I think I shall go to bed now; you're dull dogs; I'm doing all the talking. Anyone walk as far as Curzon Street? Good night, everybody."

His departure was the signal for a general break-up, and a moment later O'Rane and I were alone. He was silent and out of humour, and I did not need to be told that his efforts to dance with Sonia had been fruitless. I mentioned casually that my uncle wanted to meet him and suggested he should dine with us before going back to Oxford. This, he told me, was impossible: he was up to his eyes in work and had already wasted more time than he could afford.

"Your Schools aren't for a year," I pointed out.

"No, but I only work during term. In the vac. I see life."

I recalled what Sonia had told me on the subject.

"What's it all for?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "You must do something."

"Yes, but—messing about at the bottom of a mine? It would be cleaner for you and more amusing for me if you came and stayed with me in Ireland."

"Or with the Daintons in Hampshire. There's quite a run on me. Sonia's frightfully offended because I haven't been near Crowley Court for a year and a half."

Than O'Rane no man was harder to convince that he could ever be in the wrong.

"When people are engaged ..." I began.

Almost fiercely he cut me short.

"And the engagement laughed at, and you threatened with the door and blackguarded for taking advantage of a girl's youth.... And your letters held up; I was forgetting that. God! George, if you'd the pride of a cur ...!" He stopped abruptly, stretched his hand out for the cigarettes and lit one. "I went to Dainton," he continued more calmly, "and asked if he'd let me marry Sonia on a thousand a year—it was like bargaining with a Persian Jew over the price of a camel. He wouldn't commit himself. I told him I'd have the money two years after coming down from Oxford, and he stroked his fat cheeks and told me I didn't know the difficulties of making money.... Difficulties! As though Almighty God hadn't shot 'em down all round us so that we shall have something in life to overcome! And that from a man who inherited a brewery and let it down till he's glad to sell it at two-thirds the valuation of twenty years ago! Yes, the Daintons are washing their hands of—commerce. I told him—all this was in Sonia's presence—that I'd be judged by my own vain boastings. I'd come up in three years' time to show him if I'd made good, and if she'd wait.... Or if she wouldn't.... I left her a free hand...."

"It was only fair," I put in.

"To me, yes."

"To her."

"To me, George. There's not much merit in being faithful to a promise. But when you're not bound in any way, when it's just a matter of your own pride.... Sonia must show if she can make good three years hence. If we both come up true—well, there you are."

He threw his cigarette away, yawned, and sank lower into the chair.

"When did all this happen?" I asked.

"Oh, a year ago. More. It was just after the row."

"Well, what's the trouble to-night?"

O'Rane's eyes, always an interesting study in rapid emotion, became charged with sudden anger.

"She thinks I've cooled off because I don't write," he said. "George, I'm flesh and blood, I can't write—not letters that Lady Dainton would pass—to a girl I want to be my wife."

"Why don't you go and see her occasionally?" I suggested.

"I've got other work."

"I bet you don't get fat on what you earn carting hay in Wiltshire."

"I don't do it for the money. I want to know the lives these fellows are leading. Man's entitled to 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,' and there are moments when I begin to doubt if every man the wide world over is getting what I claim he's entitled to. I didn't think I was when I was a kid of fourteen. I don't think sweated labourers, prostitutes, incurables, children with tainted blood—I don't think they're getting all they're entitled to. The average Armenian, the natives of the Belgian Congo—I'm not easy in my mind about them, George. But before I die—my God!" He turned suddenly as a hand came to rest on his shoulder, and a voice behind him remarked:

"You're young to be talking of death, Mr. O'Rane."

"Let me introduce you to my uncle, Raney," I said.

He sprang to attention with the same click of the heels I had observed in Burgess's library some seven years before. As their hands met, Bertrand searched the lean, animated face and looked steadily into the expressive, defiant black eyes.

"I understand you are the late Lord O'Rane's son?" Raney drew himself up to the last inch of his height, for all the world like a rock-python waiting to strike. "Your father was a close personal friend of mine," Bertrand went on; "I am very proud to meet his son."

I set the words down as they were spoken; and, to read, there is little enough in them. Yet, when I heard them uttered, I still recall that my eyes began to smart. Bertrand's manner—half-sneering, half-openly brutal—had taken on a new courtliness towards a boy fifty years his junior. I do not regard myself as a man of undue sensibility: the change of tone was not created by my imagination. O'Rane lowered his eyes, bowed and murmured:

"Thank you, sir."

I have never seen a quicker or completer conquest. Gradually we relaxed our self-consciousness. I brought Bertrand a chair and gave him a cigar to smoke.

"Until two hours ago," he told O'Rane, "I knew no more of your existence than, I expect, you knew of mine."

"Oh, I'd heard a lot about you, sir," Raney answered.

"Lies from George?"

"No, sir. True talk from my father. My first term at Melton I turned you up in 'Whitaker.'"

"The 'London Directory' would have done as well," said Bertrand.

"Is it too late for me to call?"

"By no means. Were you too proud to come before?"

"Too superstitious, sir."

Bertrand leant forward and laid his hand on O'Rane's knee.

"George was talking about you to-night," he said. "I could have offered a helping hand, perhaps."

"Perhaps that was what I was afraid of, sir."

My uncle looked at him with amusement.

"You are—an independent young man," he said.

"I believe in Destiny," said O'Rane, with an answering smile.

"What on earth has that to do with it?" asked Bertrand.

"I wasn't going to lie down and die as long as there was preordained work to do. Destiny meant me to win through."

"She didn't help you much," I said.

"I'm not so sure. I dropped down once on the sidewalk in Chicago, and a woman took me in and nursed me round. Nursed me by day and—earned her living by night. When I went to pay her back and say good-bye before I sailed, she was dead. Just two months in all. And if ever a woman's soul fluttered straight to heaven——"

"What are your plans for the future?" Bertrand interrupted prosaically. He, too, seemingly found O'Rane's intensity of feeling and speech a little disconcerting at first.

Raney woke suddenly from his reverie.

"I'm going back to Oxford to-morrow, sir."

"And after to-morrow?"

"I've got my Schools next year."

"I think George said you'd taken one first. What do you expect in your finals?"

"Commercially, there's no point in an honour school unless you take a first. After that, I have money to make. After that...."

He broke off and shrugged his shoulders.

"It will be Destiny's turn," I suggested.

O'Rane turned to me with a good-humored smile.

"I suppose it's all a wild welter of words to you, George?" he asked.

"No more than any other hypothesis unsupported by evidence," I said. "Your preordained mission...."

"Isn't there one form of work you can do better than all others? Haven't you one supreme aptitude? Form an alliance between aptitude and opportunity...."

"And you get a man of Destiny," I said.

"I leave you the honour of the phrase."

Bertrand glanced at his watch and pushed his chair hurriedly back.

"A quarter to four!" he exclaimed. "I must get home. George, I want you to arrange for David—excuse me, it was your father's name, too—for David to come and dine with us. A Saturday, of course. I hope you will come, David. I'll charge you for your dinner, if you like; and I think you owe me one evening after seven years."

"I'll come any time you ask me, sir."

"I'll leave you in George's hands. By the way, mysticism is too fine and rare a thing to rationalize for youthful sceptics. You will no more make your creed intelligible to George than you will teach me to play chess without a board. Good night, my boy."

"Good night, sir. I—I wish I hadn't waited so long."

"Perhaps it was preordained for the strengthening of your faith," my uncle answered, with a smile.

O'Rane and I returned to the ballroom to take leave of Lady Dainton. Barely six couples remained, and at the end of each dance one or two white, exasperated mothers darted forward, whispering angrily, "You must come now, dear." Even Crabtree had gone, and Sonia was breathlessly battling with her partner, Summertown, to win the even sovereign he had ventured with the leader of the band on a test of endurance. The band eventually won by doubling its pace, whereupon Summertown claimed a foul and stood in the middle of the room shouting, "Ob-jeck-shun!" till Roger Dainton silenced him with an offer of bones and beer.

"Good night, Sonia, and many thanks," I said. "It was the star turn of the season."

"Good night, Bambina," said O'Rane. "See you again some day."

"Good night, dear one," she answered casually; and then, with a show of contrition, "I'm sorry we didn't have that one together."

"So am I, but it can't be helped now."

"There were such crowds of people I had to dance with," she explained.

O'Rane shook hands and came away with me. Perhaps he felt, as I did, that the explanation was in the nature of an anticlimax.

V

During the first half of the 1905 Season I saw the Daintons three times: after their ball it is hardly an exaggeration to say we met daily. Our new feverish intimacy was not entirely of my seeking, and I am free to admit that Lady Dainton's capable energy left me then, as it leaves me now, with a feeling of scared bewilderment, while the measure of Sonia's success in subjugating London came rapidly to be the measure of my dislike for her. When, however, my uncle fell a victim to internal gout and departed for Marienbad at the end of June, he left me a house, a box at Covent Garden, a voluminous correspondence and the financial welfare of the War Fund to engage my spare time. This last spelt Lady Dainton and afternoon meetings in Rutland Gate. I nerved myself to face the inevitable and wire an invitation to O'Rane to stay with me when term was over.

He kept me company till Goodwood, and one of our first acts was to dine with the Daintons. I say it in no ungracious spirit, but at this time it was hardly possible not to dine with the Daintons. Turn up the files of the "Morning Post" and you will read some four or five times a week that a very successful ball had been given the previous evening by Mrs. X., "who looked charming in an Empire gown of ivory silk brocade," that among those present were the "Duchess of This, the Countess of That, Lady Dainton and Miss Dainton," and that dinners were given before the ball by "the Duchess of Here, the Countess of There and Lady Dainton." Lord Loring and other well-known dancing men are reported to have looked in during the evening.

Sometimes I feel my life has been embittered by the failure of the "Morning Post" to distinguish me by name; not until I entered the House was I segregated from the herd of "well-known dancing men," and this was more a compliment to the parliament of a great, free people than to myself, for by that time I had bidden almost complete farewell to Claridge's and the Ritz, the Empire Hotel and those ill-constructed tombs in Grosvenor Place that were tenanted, upholstered and beflowered for a night between two eternities of desolation.

By that time, too, the Daintons had scaled an eminence where I could hardly hope to follow them. The "Tickler" and the "Catch" were never wearied of publishing full-length, whole-page photographs of "Sir Roger Dainton, Bart., the popular member for the Melton Division of Hampshire," and Lady Dainton, "who is organizing a sale of work on behalf of the victims of the Vesuvius eruption." If a hospital matinÉe took place, Miss Sonia Dainton sold programmes; a theatrical garden-party, and she managed a stall; a mission bazaar, and she pinned in fading buttonholes at half a crown a time. And punctually the "Tickler" or "Catch" would depict her at work with her fellows—Lady Hermione Prideaux, all teeth and hat, on one side; and Miss Betty Marsden, the light comedy star from the Avenue Theatre, on the other. And when the last Vesuvius victim had been clothed in crewel work and London had emptied, the indefatigable camera-man would take wing to the country and photograph "Lady Dainton and her daughter at their beautiful Hampshire seat."

Sonia repaid the trouble as well as Lady Hamilton or La Giaconda. And I think if hard work by itself is to be rewarded, Lady Dainton got no more than her deserts. Ex pede Herculem, and I judge her day by the hour she spared for the War Fund. The Committee Meeting was taken comfortably and unhurriedly in her stride. She was at the time a dignitary of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Primrose League Dame, a Visitor to half a dozen girls' schools, the president of several nursing and Needlework Guilds and—I believe—a vice-president of every Girls' Club, Rescue Home, Purity League and Association of Decayed Gentlewomen in the kingdom. Lady Dainton was one of those women who accumulated arduous and unpaid offices as dukes collected directorships in the golden days of the company-promoting 'nineties. What is more, she worked hard at all of them. When I think of her hurrying from Committee to Prizegiving, and from Prizegiving to Sale of Work, I almost cease to regard woman as man's physical inferior, though I may still wonder how far the world's general welfare would have been retarded had she remained at home with her feet on a sofa and a novel in her lap.

I certainly think Sonia would have lived happier if she had never set foot in London. Her personal success went to her head, and it took ten years of three lives and a war at the end to sober her and restore some sense of perspective. "You can give corn to thoroughbreds," my uncle would begin—and then I usually changed the subject. A woman, in Bertrand's Oriental eyes, was the plaything of so much sexual passion, irresponsible and unsafe until she was veiled and married, and even then perverse and unbalanced.

"To a man, sex is an incident," he would say; "to a woman, it's everything in this world and the next. You are too full of idealism, George. You pretend man's perfectible, that woman's got a capacity for disinterested self-sacrifice. You'll outgrow that phase, my boy; you'll find that with all our inventions and discoveries and religions and philosophies and civilization and culture, we're devilish little way removed from the beasts. That young woman—I mention no names if it's a sore point with you—may turn into an admirable mother, but as an unsatisfied beast of prey.... My dear boy, it's not her fault, and you and your friends have contributed to make her what she is."

Contributed, perhaps. But, if not her fault, neither was it ours, but the fault of Society and human nature, the action and reaction of the sexes. As the year drew to its close I was too deeply immersed in politics to watch the social comedy, but in the summer and autumn there was little else to do. For five months I observed the psychological development of a girl who was physically attractive—and nothing more: not gifted, not clever, not accomplished, of no spiritual grandeur—a dainty, brilliant, social butterfly. Sonia was no more than that: I doubt if she ever will be more. Yet men are so constituted that it was enough to assure her triumph.

O'Rane and I observed in company. He was pledged to bear-lead young Summertown through the United States in August and September, and till that time I prevailed on him to leave the industrial conditions of England alone. The emptiness of our life must, I fear, have galled him, and, looking back on it all, I made a mistake in bringing him in view of Sonia and her gaudy fellow-butterflies. Technically they met as old friends without a claim on one another, each free to repent in any given way of their rash early engagement. In practice the liberty was one-sided: the greater Sonia's emancipation, the more critical he became; and Sonia, who was no fonder of criticism than any good-looking girl in her first season, grew first restless, then resentful and finally rebellious. When I said good-bye to Raney at Euston, I felt he was not leaving a day too soon; and this is not to blame him, but to underline the impossible position he and Sonia had taken up.

Before he left I recall a series of indecisive skirmishes. There was, for example, the Covent Garden engagement, in which I was routed. With a misguided idea of friendliness and in an attempt to separate Crabtree and Sonia before the whole of London had coupled their names, I placed my uncle's box at the Daintons' disposal, and, whenever we found an opera we liked, Lady Dainton, Sonia, Raney and I used to dine together either in Princes Gardens or Rutland Gate and drive down together to Covent Garden. O'Rane was a musician; I had an untutored love of music; Lady Dainton, I fancy, felt it was the right thing to do, and Sonia was too overwrought and overexcited to mind what the invitation was so long as she could accept it. Roger Dainton, who rimed 'Lied' with 'Slide,' professed zeal for the House of Commons on such occasions, and on reflection I admire him for his frank Philistinism. With Sonia chattering unconcernedly through "Tristan," and with her mother leaning out to bow to her social acquisitions until I expected every moment to have to clutch her by the heels, the way of the Wagnerian was strait and thorny. But then, as Sonia said, "You come to Covent Garden to see people."

It was in seeing and being seen that we courted disaster. One night, as I was ordering coffee in the lounge, Crabtree attached himself to our party and accompanied us to our box. The next night I found him dining at Rutland Gate, and he asked me—before the soup plates were removed—whether I could squeeze him into a corner; he was prepared, if necessary to stand. And no sooner had he secured a programme than he exclaimed:

'"Il Trovatore!' I love that! To-morrow night, too, by Jove——"

"Well, why...." Sonia began and looked at me.

"You'd better roll along here, Crabtree," I said.

He brought a heavy hand crashing on to my knee.

"Stout fellow!" he cried. "What about dinner? Will you come to me, or shall I come to you, or—or what?"

"Oh, you'd better all dine with us," suggested Lady Dainton, tactfully, as he hesitated to fill in particulars of his invitation.

"Raney and I have got some men dining with us at the Club, I'm afraid," I improvised. And as we walked home I remarked, "We are beaten, my son."

"What a city to loot London is!" O'Rane murmured. The criticism, if not original, was at least true. I called it to mind whenever I found Crabtree feeding himself at his friends' expense, or Sonia accepting invitations from people she disliked rather than drop for an instant out of the race.

"I imagine we're becoming Americanized, Raney," I said one afternoon a few weeks later when he and I called on the Daintons to say good-bye before leaving London.

"The girls are," he answered. "They think men exist for the sole purpose of buying 'em sweets, taking them to theatres, running errands for them. Just listen." He crossed the room and drew up a chair by Sonia. "What have you been doing lately, Bambina?"

Sonia wrinkled her brow in sudden petulance.

"I wish you'd drop that silly name, David," she said.

"What have you been doing, Sonia?" he asked.

"Oh, heavens! What haven't I? Mr. Erckmann took me to a meet of the Four-in-Hand Club yesterday. I dined with Lord Summertown at the Berkeley. We went on to the Vaudeville, had supper at the Savoy, and then—and then—oh yes, we danced with Hardrodt, the soda-water king. Why weren't you there, George?"

"Frankly, I haven't much use for Hardrodt," I said. "The only time I met him I thought he was a bit of an outsider."

Sonia spread out her hands with a movement of deprecation.

"But Society lives by its outsiders."

"A man oughtn't to get tight in other people's houses," I persisted.

"Well, it was his own house last night."

"Did he keep sober?" I asked.

"Well, there are sober men and sober men," she answered. "'Not drunk, but having drink taken.'"

O'Rane looked at her gravely for a moment, then he asked:

"Why d'you allow yourself to be seen in a house like that?"

"What's the harm?" Sonia demanded gaily. "He did us awfully well."

"You admit he's an outsider, yet you accept his hospitality...."

"Oh, you little Oxford boys with your logic!" Sonia laughed. "Have a choc.? They're Lord Summertown's farewell present. You'll take care of him in America, won't you, David? He's such a love, I should never forgive you if you lost him. What are you going to do out there?"

At the sound of his own name Summertown joined us.

"I'm going to learn American," he assured us. "Say, this is my fi'ist visit to the U-nited States. Gee! I reckon this is a bully place. Pleased to meet you, Miss Dainton. I say, Raney, what's the proper answer to that?"

"No mere European has ever discovered. Get it in first and then clear out while they're still feeling for their guns."

"You're a fat lot of use," Summertown retorted. "Here I'm going out to improve my mind. What's a 'cinch'? And this rotten American War of Independence I'm always up against—when'll it be over? I want to be a pukka Yank."

"You'll be more esteemed as you are," O'Rane answered. "Better let me do the talking."

"Oh, you'll only be taken for an Irish immigrant," returned Summertown.

There he was wide of the mark. There is a story that O'Rane, in shovel hat and clerical collar, bearded the night porter of his own college at two in the morning and gained permission to call on one of the chaplains in Meadow Buildings. I have seen him successfully assume an alien nationality in Montmartre, Seville and Leghorn; while the first draft of American Rhodes scholars, scattered though they be to the ends of the earth, may recall the inaugural address delivered in hearing of the scandalized CÆsars by an alleged attachÉ of the United States Embassy.

They may remember a slight, passionate figure with black hair and arresting eyes who urged them in the name of their great Republic to resist all interference with their liberty on the part of the University authorities and to lynch any black men they found lurking around Balliol or St. John's. Robert Hawke, of Texas and Hertford, six feet five and proportionately broad, may not yet have forgotten the night when the imposture was discovered; he alone may be able to explain why, after pursuing Raney down Holywell with a loaded revolver and running him to earth in Hell Passage, he tamely consented to breakfast next morning with the man he had sworn to slay. The Rhodes scholars were a fair mark for O'Rane whenever he had an outbreak. Creevey, of Melbourne and Trinity, still preserves the peremptory note that bade him call next morning on the Junior Proctor, Mr. D. O'Rane, though the House Mission has probably long ere this expended the five-shilling fine for non-attendance at the first University Sermon of the term. To add one digression to another, I have never understood how O'Rane survived four years at Oxford without being sent down.

The Covent Garden skirmish was my affair, and after summary defeat I retired into private life. O'Rane's moral lecture was no more successful than my diplomacy: the Americanization of women went on unchecked—if indeed the American girl be as Raney saw her, a social prostitute who would sell herself to the highest bidder and give as little as possible in return; I privately believe the breed to be indigenous to the wealthier strata of English society. He failed and retired to the other side of the Atlantic. Between the two skirmishes came the intervention of Loring House.

I was taking pot-luck there one night when Lady Amy asked me in an undertone how Raney's engagement was progressing. I told her all I knew, and she broke a significant silence by observing:

"Oh, I just wanted to know."

It was not all she wanted to know, and I ventured to tell her so.

"Well, Sonia really is behaving rather extraordinarily," she went on. "I wonder her mother...."

"Lady Dainton accompanies her everywhere," I pointed out.

"Yes, either she doesn't see or she doesn't care."

"Probably she thinks there's no harm in it."

Lady Amy shook her head.

"This is my fourth season, George."

"And their first. I submit that they don't know how many people sit round the walls of a ballroom inventing scandal."

"Well, someone ought to tell her. You're a friend of the family."

"Not if I know it, Amy!" I said. "This is not a man's job."

"I'd do it myself, if I knew how to start."

"You've only to tell her there's safety in numbers," I suggested.

It is to be presumed my advice was followed quite literally, for the next time I dined at Rutland Gate the party had doubled in size, and no one got enough to drink. Sonia very dutifully granted dances to all the male guests and, so far as I could see, impartially encouraged all to make love to her. Certainly she discussed the possibility of platonic friendship with me at 10.45, when I had hardly finished my dinner; and four hours later, when Valentine Arden was changing his second buttonhole, I observed the expression of weariness that settled onto his passionless, immobile features when rash newcomers sought to shake his precocious celibacy.

"When does a girl get over the awkward age?" he demanded.

"At death," I hazarded, and he left me in disgust, because he clearly wanted to tell me the answer himself.

Thus to some extent Amy Loring succeeded where Raney and I had failed, but her ultimate defeat was more humiliating than ours. After the last War Fund meeting of the season I went up stairs to find a cup of tea and say good-bye to Sonia before starting out on my autumn campaign among the electors of Wiltshire. Crabtree was with her, and in a jaded, end-of-season spirit they were discussing future arrangements and enumerating the houses they "had to" visit.

"When are you going to House of Steynes, George?" Sonia asked.

I gave her the date, and we found we were invited for the same week.

"You're not selected, are you, Tony?" she asked Crabtree.

"Well, I don't quite know how I'm fixed," he answered, without committing himself. "I'm due with the Fordyces for the Twelfth, and from there...."

He worked out a chain of houses running from the south-west to the north-east of Scotland. House of Steynes, of course, lay across his path; the only question was whether he could fit in....

"By Jove, yes!" he exclaimed, with an air of one making an unexpected discovery. "A blank week! I've a very good mind to ask old Loring if he can give me a bed! It's a rotten business staying at an hotel, and if you're all going to be there...."

He finished his tea and drove to Curzon Street. Loring was at home, the case for charity was presented, and Crabtree carried the day. In an age of artificial politeness no other result was possible; House of Steynes could accommodate half a regiment, and there had never been a breach or the opportunity of a breach.

"The dirty, greasy dog!" Loring fumed when we met at dinner. And for want of a better description, "The dirty, greasy dog!"

I have never calculated the proportion of independent men outside the Navy, Army, Church and Stage who have neither stood as parliamentary candidates nor worked on behalf of a friend or neighbour. It must be almost negligible, and no useful purpose will be served by a description of my first canvass. It was conventional in every feature—from the underpaid rustics who believed their landlords could somehow see into the walls of a ballot-box to the Big and Little Loaf pamphlets and the Chinese Labour posters which the Liberal Publication Department rained down on me in return for ridiculously few shillings and pence. My speeches were as conventional as the personalities exchanged with the Honourable Trevor Lawless, the sitting member, who invited me to dine, expressed the hope that the election would be conducted as among gentlemen and then uttered statements for which I had to make him apologize on the front page of "The Times."

The canvass lasted nearly a month, and I returned to Princes Gardens and my uncle with a sense that I had more than a sporting chance of carrying the seat. With all a young candidate's assured enthusiasm I gave Bertrand full rÉsumÉs of all my speeches and underlined the telling points, till a more than usually unconcealed yawn reminded me that he too had addressed mass meetings and conducted door-to-door visitations.

"But where are the Ideals, George?" he demanded after my exposition of "The Case against Tariff Reform." "Where is your Imperial Federation, your Secular Solution, your new Poor Law, your Land Scheme, your Housing Reform? Have you outgrown that phase?"

"I can't say they went down very well," I answered. "The Food Taxes——"

My uncle threw back his head and laughed.

"Democracy! What crimes are committed in thy name!"

"The people aren't educated up to it," I returned unguardedly.

"So you stirred them with largely imaginary accounts of labour conditions on the Rand, you played on their fears of dearer food; and, if they return you, you'll blithely scrap the existing Constitution, interfere with the liberty of the subject in every conceivable way. George, George, you have much to learn of representative government."

The tone of my uncle's criticism nettled me—possibly because I felt it was justified.

"If you wait to get a lead from below," I said, "you'll wait all your life without attempting anything!"

Bertrand shook his head uncomprehendingly.

"This fury for Reform!" he exclaimed. "When you've outgrown the phase, George, you may perhaps recall my words of wisdom. I'm a democrat because I believe the folly of many is better than the corruption of few. Sometimes I ask my constituents to support me in advocating a change, sometimes they press a change on me; and, if I approve or can't argue them out of it, I push it on their behalf. The rest of the time I'm content to see that democracy doesn't lose its privileges. I defend the existing order from Tory attacks. Peace—Economy—and personal liberty to do what you dam' please so long as you don't hinder another man from doing what he dam' pleases. I don't affect the modern craving for legislation; I've still to learn that it's wanted, and if it's wanted you must prove that it suits the genius of the race. And I hold that the English find salvation quickest and best if you leave 'em to 'emselves. Of course, that's unfashionable nowadays. I shall be a bit of a candid friend to our Government when we get back. But you and I are poles apart. With the recognition of the Unions and the extension of the Franchise the active work of radicalism is done."

His easy, Pangloss tone exasperated me.

"And sweated Labour ...?" I began.

"Start your minimum wage, and it may pay a man to scrap low-grade labour and put in machines."

"Are you satisfied with our present haphazard Empire?"

"You're not going to cement it by a tariff or a highfalutin' proclamation," he answered. "When anyone wants closer union, when it's worth anyone's while, it'll be done. You want it. Good. Well, do a little missionizing round the Empire, then; don't go into the House to do it." He took out his cigar-case and threw it over to me. "Smoke one and don't look so dam' dejected, George. I've been in the House the devil of a long time, and every day I go there I'm more and more impressed with the extraordinary little that can be done there. I'm not being discouraging on purpose; I want to save you from a crushing disappointment. Shed a few of your illusions, get rid of the 'Thursday Essays' frame of mind—capital debating-society stuff and precious little more. If you'll remember that the government of men is the hardest thing in the world, that this country is a very old and illogical place, with a half-feudal, half-mercantile aristocracy still in effective occupation, and that the House of Commons is the clumsiest tool a revolutionary ever had to handle, you'll be some way on the road to political sanity. Don't merely think of ideal reforms and get hysterical when you can't bring 'em to birth with the aid of a one-clause Bill: face your difficulties squarely, see the utmost extent to which, with all your courage and perseverance, you can overcome them, and then never rest till you've secured up to that limit. The one way sends you into the Cabinet; the other makes you the hero of a party of three in the Smoking-Room. Needless to say, you think I'm deliberately damping down your enthusiasm?"

"I think you're a bit jaundiced by twenty years of Tory rule," I said.

"Dear boy, I was through the '80 Parliament, and the '86 and the '92. If you want things done, you'd better go to Fleet Street. The House of Commons is being more and more ignored each day. Gladstone started it by his monster meetings; he could speak to six thousand electors instead of six hundred members. And the Press learned the lesson. A group of papers that get into every hand in the country, permeate every brain—that's worth a year of perorations and lobbying. But you'd better come along and see for yourself. There'll be an election in a few months now, so you'd better not waste too much time paying visits. Nobody's any idea what our majority will be like."

Between my first and second campaigns I paid but one visit—a week with the Lorings at House of Steynes. The Daintons were there before me, and Valentine Arden, my cousin Violet, Prendergast of the Foreign Office, Sally Farwell and her mother, Rupert Harley and the inevitable Crabtree arrived the same day. There was good shooting and tolerable golf, and in the evenings and on wet days we used to move the furniture and rugs out of the library and dance to Roger Dainton's heavy-footed working of the pianola. Early in life Loring had appreciated that the success of a house-party depended on compelling his female guests to breakfast in their rooms and allowing everyone to do what he liked for the rest of the day. We talked, shot, danced, played bridge, ate, drank, slept—and devised ingenious and bloodthirsty ways of speeding Crabtree on his way to Banff.

"And if he'd take that Dainton child with him," my cousin exclaimed on the evening of our arrival, "I don't think anybody would miss them. George, what's happened to her? She used to be such a nice little thing."

"She has been insufficiently slapped," I suggested. "I am now a serious student of social conditions; I have spent ten weeks in the East of London and ten months in the West. It is my considered opinion that wife-beating will only be stamped out when women are beaten regularly and severely before they become wives."

Violet's pretty blue eyes glanced across to the far end of the hall where an ill-suppressed tittering rose from behind an oak settle.

"And Mr. Crabtree?" she asked.

"I have seen the dog-fanciers of Shadwell holding his like below the surface of a rain-butt for five minutes at a time. In Crabtree's case I should lengthen the period to avoid risks. Incidentally, what has Sonia been doing?"

She brushed the low-clustering curls from her forehead with an angry little hand.

"Have you ever seen a shop-girl with two men on the pier at Brighton?" she demanded.

"My education was skimped," I had to admit.

"Well, you can make up for it now," she said, as Loring appeared and claimed her for the first dance.

I began making up for it next morning when the Lorings and Violet were at Mass. Refusing to breakfast alone in her room, Sonia raided a silent but amicable bachelor party in the dining-room, engaged it in conversation and inquired its plans for the day. None of us was anxious to shoot on the morrow of our journey, and after considerable deliberation she decided to play golf with Prendergast. They started off at ten, and by one-thirty Prendergast had had his devotion sorely tried.

"I told her to take a jersey," he confided to me in the smoking-room. "She wouldn't. She went out in a north-east wind with a blouse you could see through, and when we got to the links I had to come back and find her a coat. We got on famously till we reached the third tee, then she said she was too hot and I must carry the damned thing because the caddie's hands were dirty. I gave her a stroke a hole and was dormy at the turn; then she must needs say she was tired and insist on coming home. At the club-house she discovered she was hungry and sent me in to forage. I brought her out sandwiches, cake, chocolate, and milk." He checked the list with emphatic fingers. "She looked at them and said they weren't nice and she could hang on till lunch-time. Making a fool of a fellow," he concluded indignantly.

I murmured suitable words of sympathy and imagined that he had now learned his lesson. At luncheon, however, Sonia sat next to him and, with her innocent brown eyes looking into his, asked him to describe his work at the Foreign Office. When we left the table he was enslaved a second time. As the wind had dropped and rain was beginning to fall, she sent him to find a book she had lost; when he returned with it she was too sleepy to read and demanded bridge to keep her awake; no sooner had the table been set and three unwilling players dragged from their slumbers in the smoking-room than she decided the weather had cleared up sufficiently for her to take a walk.

"Anyone coming?" she asked at large.

Loring, Prendergast, Crabtree and I offered our services as escort—in that order and with a certain interval between the third and fourth.

"Well, run along and get ready," she ordered, "or the rain'll begin again. I shall go as I am."

When we returned with overcoats and thick boots she looked uncertainly at her thin shoes and inquired:

"Is it really wet outside? Perhaps I'd better change."

And change she did—every stitch of clothing she possessed, I imagine, for a full half-hour had passed before she descended in shooting-boots, Burberry and short skirt; and by that time tea was ready and the rain had set in for the night. Variations on the same theme were played daily under the eyes of Lady Loring, who was too placid to mind anything that did not affect her beloved Amy or Jim; under the eyes, too, of Lady Dainton, who, I believe, had hardly issued a command or rebuke to Sonia from the day of her birth. Crabtree and Prendergast openly kissed the rod, Loring good-humouredly regarded such treatment as being all in the day's work of a host; with the women I suppose Violet's criticism was expressive of the general feeling. I frankly derived a certain lazy amusement from watching Sonia playing the oldest game in the world; she seldom bothered me, and, while others ran errands, I was free to spend idle hours in the smoking-room with Valentine Arden, whose sex-philosophy taught him that, if a woman wanted him, she must first come and find him. Each day we elaborated a new and more masterly scheme for recalling Crabtree to town: each day we foundered on the same reef and forced the conversation at dinner in our attempt to discover his address in Lincoln's Inn and the name of his clerk.

It is perhaps humiliating to confess that his dislodgement, when it came, was not at our hands. I recall one afternoon when Prendergast fell from favour; Sonia forswore a walk with him and invited Crabtree to give his opinion of a new brassy she had just received from Edinburgh. They set out immediately after luncheon (in those days Sonia did not smoke and could not understand how it could be necessary to anyone else); at tea-time she returned alone—rather white and subdued—and went straight to her room. Her mother, Lady Loring and Amy visited her in turn and reported that she was over-tired and had lain down with a headache. As we started tea, a telegram arrived for Crabtree, followed by Crabtree himself. Tearing open the envelope, he informed us with fine surprise that his clerk had summoned him back to chambers to advise on an important case; might he have a car, would Lady Loring excuse him ...? Valentine Arden, with an author's small-minded jealousy in matters of copyright, dropped and broke a plate in sheer vexation, though to his credit be it said that the anger was short-lived, and, when Loring himself strolled round to the garage to see that his orders had not been misunderstood, Valentine was filling a petrol tank as enthusiastically as I had offered to help in the packing and dispatch of our fellow-guest.

With her taste for good 'entrances,' Sonia appeared as the car turned out of sight down the drive. The headache was gone, and throughout dinner she was almost hilarious, though by the time we had finished our cigars she had retired to bed. Two hours later I met Amy coming out of her room: she beckoned me to a window-seat by the "Mary Queen of Scots" room, and we sat down.

"Thank goodness that's over!" she exclaimed, passing her hand over her eyes.

"Is Sonia upset?" I asked.

Amy shook her head and sighed.

"I can't make out," she answered. "They've—sort of parted friends. I think she's rather glad he proposed—and thoroughly frightened when it came to the point. George, does David fancy he's going to marry her?"

"I believe he thinks so."

"I'm not sure that I envy him. But, if he is, he'd better hurry up. Sonia doesn't let much grass grow under her feet. I really rather hope mother won't let her be asked here again."

"But as long as your Prendergasts and Crabtrees spread their faces out to be walked on——" I began.

"Well, don't let her do it here," Amy interrupted. "I don't want to see dear old Jim scalped."

"He's much too lazy," I said.

Amy raised her eyebrows in surprise.

"My dear, you're not very observant."

"I've been watching rather closely," I protested. "He's decently civil——"

"To her, yes. But d'you remember a certain Horse Show week when we were staying with the Hunter-Oakleighs in Dublin, and Jim and Violet——"

"But that's the ancientest of ancient history! Jim was hardly short-coated at the time."

"They kept it up a good while," she answered, with a toss of the head.

"Amy, you're a shameless match-maker. First of all Raney and Sonia, then Jim and Violet——"

"As long as it isn't the other way round, I don't mind. Sonia isn't even a Catholic."

"Neither Jim nor Sonia will marry for years yet," I said. "People don't nowadays. You have a much better time unmarried; there's an element of uncertainty and interest about you...."

"There's far too much uncertainty," said Amy, with a sigh. "Sometimes I have perfect nightmares about Jim. You see, he is worth a woman's while, and I have a horror that he'll make some hideous mistake and then be too proud to wriggle out of it. However, don't let's meet trouble half-way."

I left House of Steynes two days later and crossed to Ireland. On the writing-table of my library at Lake House I found a picture-postcard representing the Singer Building, with the question, "Any news? Raney." I sent a postcard with an indifferent photograph of the landing-stage at Kingstown, inscribed with the words, "No news. George Oakleigh." Then I said good-bye to the life I had been leading since my return to England. Bertrand wired in October that an election was imminent, and I spent the autumn in an Election fur coat and an Election car, tearing from end to end of my constituency and delivering speeches for which—as Gibbon might have said—the part-author of "Thursday Essays" might afterwards have blushed with shame. I have fought but two elections, and the memory of the cheap pledges and cheaper pleasantries, the misleading handbills and vile posters—distributed impartially by either side—give me no feeling of moral elation.

And in 1906 the contamination seemed the more unwelcome for being superfluous. There was room for high thinking and lofty ideals at a time when the country went mad in its lust to restore Liberalism to power. Heaven knows what programme I could not have put forward so long as it radically reversed the measures and spirit of the Conservative administration!

Or so it seemed in the early weeks of the 1906 Session, when hundreds of new members pressed forward to take the Oath and sign the Roll of Parliament, each one as strong in the confidence of his electors, each one as resolved to bring in a new heaven and a new earth—and each one as innocent of parliamentary forms of procedure as myself.