1

It was not until I had introduced some little organisation into my work that I had opportunity or justification for seeing my friends. I have reached an age when I like to go early to bed between two long days of work; I never ceased to wonder, therefore, at the nervous vitality of some of the people whom I was meeting; London was fuller than I had ever known it, the customary autumn exodus had ended with the war; and, what with a few hundred officers home on leave and athirst for amusement, what with a few thousand girls working in hospitals, canteens and Government offices, anyone who wanted distraction had not to look long for it. The restlessness which seized London every summer before the war seemed to have increased and become permanent, with an astounding new licence which I found hard to understand. I suppose the war broke down most of the old social conventions, but I sometimes wondered in the early days whether there was anything which the strictly brought up and closely chaperoned young girl of other days was now not allowed to do....

Young O'Rane carried me off to my first war party. After I had looked for him unsuccessfully for some weeks, we had been dining at the House and talking business and school politics, for the Governors of Melton School had lately co-opted me in place of Aylmer Lancing, and I had heard from George that O'Rane was temporarily on the staff there. At ten o'clock he told me that he was due home for a house-warming and plunged into a description of his domestic life with all the eagerness of a child—which is what he was—shewing a new toy. Old Bertrand Oakleigh had given them the house as a wedding present; ever since his illness at the outbreak of war (no one was allowed to call it a stroke) the old man had needed some little attention; what easier than to set a couple of rooms aside for him? And the place was so big that you could give a shakedown to "most anyone"—and a meal. It was what O'Rane had always wanted to do—as in the Middle Ages (rather vaguely).... I should hardly believe some of the people he'd had there even in five weeks.... People were such fun; Beresford, for instance ... full of good stuff, full of white-hot idealism which only needed to be directed. "And he's fallen in love with my wife, so she's gently taming him."

He threw out his sentences with jerky exuberance, passionately serious at one moment and laughing at himself and me the next.

And that girl I had met, Hilda Merryon.... A little throb of anger came into O'Rane's voice; she had led a most awful life for about three years; some brute had victimised her, and her sanctimonious devil of a father had turned her out of the house.... Now she was a new woman, though years must pass before she overcame her bitterness and hatred towards the world, and, when he went back to Melton, she was coming as a sort of secretary....

We had reached the house, and he threw open the door and stood aside to let me in.

"I hardly felt this was a normal household when I was here before," I said.

In the light of the hall I could see his black eyes gleaming with laughter.

"You should hear old Oakleigh!" he suggested. "'It's a phase, my dear boy. You'll grow out of it. You see the devil of a lot of strange things, if you live to be as old as I am.'" He paused to laugh at his own exquisite mimicry of Bertrand's disillusionised, pontifical manner and gruff, disparaging voice. "Well, he wouldn't eat a twelve-course dinner with a starving man opposite him.... It makes life so much easier, if nobody thinks you're quite sane. Won't you go in?"

"Does your wife enter into the spirit of it?" I asked, as I looked at the silk curtains bellying away from the white walls.

He evaded the direct question almost apologetically.

"It's a big change after the life she led before the war," he conceded, "but then the war itself is a big change."

He had mentioned a party, but I was hardly prepared for the army of occupation which I found in the library. Every chair at the long table was filled, and the guests had overflowed and scattered throughout the room, bearing their plates and tumblers with them. Mrs. O'Rane jumped up from her place between Beresford and Deganway, making me welcome and apologising for having missed me before.

"This is such an irregular mÉnage," she exclaimed in a clear, high voice that dominated the clear, high voices around her. "David's at the House so much, and I spend my days serving out clothes to Belgian refugees, or finding them houses and work, or getting up concerts and things to raise money for them, but somebody's sure to be at home at some hour of the night. This is our house-warming, and of course David forgot all about it." She twisted her arms round her husband's neck and kissed him with an ecstasy that told me stabbingly of something that had been left out of my life, "Admit you did, sweetheart, or you won't get any supper."

"I remembered! I invited Mr. Stornaway," he protested. "And you're going to look after him while I strum. You seem to have got some people here, Sonia. And there's a sort of hint that some of them have been smoking."

The crowd, the heat, the babble of voices and the fog of tobacco smoke robbed me of resistance and individuality. Before I had been three minutes in the room, I was eating a meal which I did not need, drinking hock-cup which I knew disagreed with me and trying to carry on two conversations and at the same time to see who was already there and who was arriving. Lady Maitland introduced me volubly to a watchful-eyed, supercilious boy whose first play, she assured me, had taken London by storm. Had I seen it? If not, I must go at once; and she refreshed her memory of its name by reference to the author. When he escaped in bored embarrassment from his own biography, she explained loudly a second time that that was Eric Lane, the great coming dramatist, and confided as loudly that he was desperately in love with Babs, little Babs Neave, Barbara Neave, Lady Barbara Neave—it was no use my pretending that I didn't know her—and that Crawleigh was at his wits' end, because it was quite out of the question for them to marry, but Babs was such an extraordinary girl that, if you opposed her, you might simply drive her into his arms.... Lady Maitland shook her vigorous grey head with an air of concern and at once asked me to meet "both the silly children" at luncheon, because it would interest me....

Before the end of supper I was beginning to get my bearings and to resolve the unassimilated party into its elements. O'Rane was at the piano, surrounded by George Oakleigh, two shy and hero-worshipping pupils from Melton, Miss Hilda Merryon—still aloof and implacable—and Beresford. In the middle of the room I deduced from Sir Roger Dainton's presence a purely family gathering of Mrs. O'Rane's relations; their tongues were as busy as their eyes, and they looked slightly bewildered—as well they might—and a trifle disapproving.

On the dais Mrs. O'Rane ruled supreme. Even without the explanation which George strolled across to drawl into my ear, I placed her by her surroundings as belonging to a society with which I was very familiar before the war. Lady Sally Farwell sat on one side of her, giving an excellent and somewhat ill-natured imitation of Lady Barbara Neave, who with young Eric Lane was hardly out of ear-shot. Mr. Evelyn Staines, the romantic hero of half a hundred musical comedies at the Regency, sat on the other, looking out of humour, surprisingly unkempt and unexpectedly old. There was a youthful claque of young officers, two or three actresses, whose appearance the illustrated papers had made known to me, and a sprinkling of middle-aged nondescripts. Before the war I used to organise a good many charity bazaars, charity balls and charity matinÉes; and Mrs. O'Rane's troupe was always much in evidence. She has since told me that she and Sally Farwell appeared in three duologues and two oriental ballets on my behalf, though I am ashamed to say that my neglect of details left me ignorant of my indebtedness.

There were a dozen smaller groups, thrust into corners or wedged between the heavier furniture. I threaded my way in and out with a word here and a bow there, blinded by the smoke and deafened by the noise. All seemed to be enjoying themselves, however, and I was reasonably amused and interested. From time to time, when O'Rane began to sing or whistle to his own accompaniment, there was a rippling hush; from time to time, again, he would break off with a sudden laugh and plunge into dance music, whereat most of us flattened ourselves against the walls, while Mrs. O'Rane and Mr. Evelyn Staines gave an exhibition of highly technical stage-dancing.

"I don't quite fit your uncle Bertrand into this," I observed to George, when we found ourselves out of harm's way on the dais.

"He looked in for a moment to offer Raney his blessing and a cheque. Fortunately he can't hear much from his end of the house," was the answer.

Mrs. O'Rane ended a perilous series of movements with a more perilous leap on to her partner's shoulder and was borne breathless and triumphant to the table for hock-cup.

"George, are we shocking Mr. Stornaway?" she asked across me. "I'm so sick of the war!"

She jumped down and looked at me, breathing quickly through parted lips. Her dress was daring, and at this, my first unhurried sight of her at close quarters, I was as much fascinated as a man of my age had any right to be. The face was soft, appealing and warm, with long-lashed brown eyes, flushed cheeks like ripe apricots and a wistful mouth that drooped at the corners, when she was disappointed, and pouted over-quickly when she did not at once get what she wanted. It was a wilful, impatient little face, exacting and rather obstinate, without very much depth of character, but amazingly mobile and young, capable of a child's ecstatic abandonment to happiness and of a melting tenderness when she looked at her husband's unseeing eyes and whimsical, self-protective smile.

"In some ways it's extraordinarily like some of his omnium-gatherum parties at Oxford, Sonia," murmured George, as the tireless fingers at the piano passed from waltz to march and from march to Scandinavian boating-song half as old as time.

Mrs. O'Rane's big eyes swam.

"As like as we can make it," she whispered tremulously; and I was conscious of a new fascination. Though I have never seen a woman or man more perfectly put together, the head on the neck, the neck on the shoulders, the hands on the wrists or the wrists on the arms, there was something skin-deep and mechanical in her beauty—not necessarily reaching to the heart—until that moment.

The softness passed as suddenly as it had come, and she awoke to a sense of her duties as hostess.

"I want to introduce you to my mother, Lady Dainton," she told me.

Under cover of the presentation she escaped and in another moment was darting with the movement of a dragon-fly in search of a partner for the savage Hawaiian dance which her husband had begun to play. This in turn she abandoned to give extravagant welcome to Sir Adolphus Erskine and to thank him for a string of pearls which she held out jubilantly for his admiring inspection.

My next half-hour was more varied and less pleasant. I was introduced to Lady Dainton, who claimed acquaintance with my brother and insisted that we had met at one of Aylmer Lancing's parties at Ripley Court; I was introduced to her daughter-in-law, who had lately lost her husband and now engaged me in a sullen debate on compulsory service with a view, so far as I could follow the poor creature's distraught reasoning, to securing that as many other women as possible should lose their husbands. I exchanged a few words with Roger Dainton about the state of parties in the House and, as I fancied that I had exhausted the family, found myself confronted once more by Lady Dainton, who led me into a corner, enquired how long I had known O'Rane and begged me to use whatever influence I possessed to bring this folly to an end. Since my first sight of her I had watched a storm-cloud of disapproval banking up, but I could not imagine why its force should be expended on me.

"I'm not narrow-minded, don't you know?" she informed me with majestic uncontradictability, "but this is the first time I've seen Sonia since she was married, and this—this bear-garden is what I find."

There was no disputing the definition, but its application was limited, for she flung out her arm, until I feared it would leave its socket, in the direction of an arm-chair where Beresford, shabbier than ever by contrast with the rather rich clothes around him, was holding forth with combative resonance on the hypocrisy of our fighting for the free development of the smaller nationalities while we held our Indian Empire in unrepresentative thraldom.

"It's not what Sonia's accustomed to, it's not what she has a right to expect!" exclaimed Lady Dainton with rising indignation. "That—that creature has been mocking the people who've gone out and given their lives for their country, when half of us in the room are in mourning. As for the woman——"

"I really don't feel I can interfere," I interrupted diffidently.

She sighed with an attempt at resignation.

"I didn't know how well you knew David," she said. "Of course, he's a delightful, gallant, generous soul—nobody's fonder of him than I am—, but he's so terribly impulsive, don't you know? I really hoped that, when Sonia consented to marry him, she would—well—tame him a little. Dear David will pretend that everybody's like everybody else; well, I don't suppose either of us is a snob, Mr. Stornaway, but there are distinctions, don't you know? We should be called old-fashioned, if we said anything, but some of the people here to-night—of course, Sonia's a wonderful actress, much cleverer than half the professionals you see, so she's got into rather a theatrical set—I suppose that's the modern spirit; Eleanor Ross had a woman lunching with her to-day who six months ago—well, she wouldn't have dared.... But when it comes to turning a private house into a sort of mission-room.... One can carry democracy to excess, don't you know?"

The voice was rising again, and Mrs. O'Rane danced to my side and snatched me away on the plea that Lady Maitland wanted to fix a day for my meeting with Barbara Neave.

"Was darling mother being tiresome?" she asked sympathetically. "The casual-ward stunt, I suppose?"

"What do you feel about it yourself?" I asked her.

"About David's lame ducks? Oh, he has his friends, and I have mine, and it's no one else's business." She looked round the crowded room and then seemed to decide that she had been too brusque. "I don't know—yet, whether it will answer," she went on uncertainly. "David's always been a freak about money, he'd always give anything to anybody. Now he says that he'd be dishonoured, if he took with one hand and refused with the other.... He's rather absurd, poor darling, because he wouldn't need to take anything from anybody, if he hadn't been so frightfully smashed up in the war. And if I don't mind.... It's really rather fun, however mad it may seem. We've all of us gone mad since the War. Except David. You didn't know him, but he's almost sane compared with what he was before." She abandoned her pose of affected insincerity and turned to me with shining eyes. "You do love David, don't you?" she asked.

"My dear lady, I've only met him twice," I said.

"Isn't that more than enough?" Her expression changed restlessly; and I remembered wondering how long she would retain her looks, if she continued to live on her nerves like this. "Too many dam' dull Daintons here, you know. I made certain mother would think this sort of thing too Bohemian. She'd like me to have a prim and proper little house in one of the streets about here and entertain the conventional people in the conventional way—simply wagging my tail if I enticed an Under-Secretary here. Mother'd go miles for an Under-Secretary. Well, it's much more fun inviting the amusing people, the people you like. I am rather a Bohemian, I've always led my own life. I do now. Darling David never tries to make me do anything or stop me doing anything, he never wants to know what I've been doing.... All the same, David's 'duty to one's neighbour' stunt.... Thank goodness! he doesn't expect me to share my clothes with casual visitors!"

She stood with her eyes fixed thoughtfully and without complete comprehension on her husband's thin, mobile face. His own, black and arresting for all their sightlessness, were turned to the rafters and the shadows of the roof, as he sat with head bent back and fingers idly modulating. Then Lady Dainton came forward and took her leave; the party broke up rapidly, and, by the time that I left, only Vincent Grayle remained, talking to his hostess, while Beresford transferred himself to the other end of the room, ostentatiously turning his back and resting his injured leg on the edge of O'Rane's piano stool.

2

I left the grotesque party with the feeling that contrary to all reasonable expectation I had enjoyed myself immoderately. The enthusiasm survived the night, and at breakfast the following day I informed Yolande that I proposed to invite the O'Ranes to dine with us. Here, however, I was met with unforeseen opposition. I have no idea how the antagonism started, but at some period of their careers Yolande had decided that Mrs. O'Rane was of those who "do all the things one doesn't do," while Mrs. O'Rane has been known to dismiss my niece alliteratively as a "prig, prude and poseuse."

"You'll regret it," Yolande told me frankly enough, sagaciously smoothing back a strand of auburn hair from her forehead. "She's very fascinating, but I've an instinct about her, and you'll find she's all superfluity and flashiness. Any number of people have been in love with her, of course, but she'll grate on you. Ask any woman."

One dinner, I felt, could not commit me very deeply, and it was my own house, although I was already debating the desirability of moving into bachelor quarters and giving up my remaining rooms to the Canteen Executive. Yolande, however, was to be spared in spite of me.

Whether Mrs. O'Rane disapproved of her as strongly as she disapproved of Mrs. O'Rane, I am incompetent to say, but I was informed in terms of suitable regret that she was either dining out or having people to dine with her every night of the week; was it possible, on the other hand, for me to come on one of the days when they were at home? I had not yet finished that talk with David about Melton.... The reminder was perhaps inserted as a reason for not inviting Yolande.

I chose my night and, within five minutes of entering the house, I should have confessed, had I been honest with myself, that Yolande was right. An air of tension greeted me, an interrupted controversy was at once resumed, and I found myself required by my hostess to arbitrate in a lovers' quarrel. The cause of dispute was the girl Hilda Merryon, whose career O'Rane had briefly sketched for my benefit; fortunately she was not present at the time, but with O'Rane composed, pacific and unyielding in an arm-chair with his big St. Bernard beside him, Mrs. O'Rane flushed and aggrieved with one foot on the fender and one bare arm shielding her face from the fire, and Vincent Grayle, my fellow guest, directing and perhaps stimulating the controversy, I felt that we had enough disputants.

"I'll put it to Mr. Stornaway!" cried Mrs. O'Rane, as soon as our greetings were over. "Mr. Stornaway, we were only married in July, it's now the end of September, and I don't think David ought to go off and leave me for three months. It isn't necessary, I've asked him not to——"

O'Rane stroked the dog's head reflectively.

"But you've told me you can't get away, Sonia," he said at length. "You've got your Belgian refugee work, you've got a string of engagements and you've got Beresford laid up for months yet. You admitted, too, you'd simply be at a loose end in Melton."

"I should be with you." She tossed her head back until she was looking at him through half-closed eye-lids. "Of course, if you don't want me ..."

"But, darling, your work here ...?"

"Anybody can do that!" Mrs. O'Rane interrupted unguardedly. "That's not the point, though, and you know it isn't. I say you oughtn't to go. It's like setting a race-horse to pull a removal van."

In the pause that followed, I wondered what opportunities for propaganda Lady Dainton had enjoyed since our meeting the week before.

"I've promised to resign the moment I've paid back the money I owe," said O'Rane with emphatic reasonableness.

"The money was given you as a present."

"But I can't take presents of that kind so long as I'm fit to work. Darling Sonia, you don't imagine I want to go away from you for three months, do you? If you can come down without leaving your work here undone——"

"Oh, I should be in the way!" she interrupted with another toss of her head. "You've got your Hilda."

She looked round the room, pointedly inviting us to follow the direction of her eyes and nodding at the tidy arrangement of books, the filing-cabinet, the half-hidden safe and neat library card-catalogue. I could see O'Rane blushing, as I myself began to blush, that such a scene should be enacted before comparative strangers.

"You mustn't say things like that," he remonstrated gently; then, with the lightness of affected inspiration, "We'll put it to Mr. Stornaway, as you suggest! I'm committed, sir, as I think in honour and certainly by an understanding with the Headmaster, to go back to Melton on Thursday. You've met Miss Merryon; I'm taking her with me to act as a sort of secretary. She'll have rooms in the town and will lend me the use of her eyes in the evenings;—I was frightfully handicapped last term and had to take advantage of the boys' good-nature. I know it's an unusual arrangement, but the circumstances are unusual. I got Dr. Burgess's approval——"

"Did you tell him anything about her past?" Mrs. O'Rane broke in, tapping a gold slipper with scarlet heel against the fender.

O'Rane smiled dreamily.

"I'm chiefly concerned with her future," he answered. Something in the voice and smile told me that he was spiritually as far removed from his wife as the mad from the sane.

There was a long pause which Grayle broke by shrugging his shoulders, sighing, shaking his head at Mrs. O'Rane with an expression of rueful sympathy and finally opening his cigarette-case with a muttered request for permission to smoke.

"Of course, the world will say—," he began.

O'Rane laughed to himself.

"I don't know that I've ever paid much attention to what the world says. But Mr. Stornaway is going to arbitrate."

I looked at one disputant after another. Mrs. O'Rane's expression can best be described as mulish; O'Rane was smiling, debonair and yet, I felt,—it was the first time that I had felt it—unshakable. What part Grayle was playing I could not determine; if he had been invited to arbitrate before my arrival, he had not been successful, and I wished that he would leave me to compose the quarrel uninterrupted.

"If you've promised yourself to Dr. Burgess," I told O'Rane after consideration, "you can't disappoint him at forty-eight hours' notice. It's out of the question. You tell me that he approves of your taking Miss Merryon?"

"He'd do anything for me," O'Rane answered easily.

"Even so, if I may put it bluntly, it's an imprudent thing to do. Surely the simplest and most natural solution, as well as the pleasantest for both, is for Mrs. O'Rane to accompany you. If you want work found for Miss Merryon, that ought not to be difficult in these times; I'll pay any money for a competent shorthand-writer in my own office."

Neither O'Rane nor his wife offered any criticism, but Grayle considerately supplied the reason which both were hiding.

"That was discussed, I think," he said, "but I gather Mrs. O'Rane has her hands pretty full with work here."

"But you said anyone could do that," I reminded her. "And, as long as Bertrand's here, there'll be some one to look after Beresford."

In addition to Bertrand there were two maids and a plenipotent housekeeper, for Mrs. O'Rane liked to boast of her domestic incompetence. Mine was the obvious solution, and I could see that she recognised it. There was a suppressed yawn—and a gain of three seconds.

"If I died, some one would have to do my work," she admitted, "or, it wouldn't be done.... But, Mr. Stornaway, David's a member of Parliament, his whole future is in the House; isn't it ridiculous for him to waste his time teaching a pack of schoolboys?"

As she shifted her ground, I felt that my work was done.

"I haven't got much future of any kind," I said, "but I'm a begging-letter writer in the morning and a second-class clerk in a government office the rest of the day. These are not normal times, Mrs. O'Rane, and he can't leave his chief stranded at the last moment without anyone to take his place. When he comes back at Christmas, there'll be an opportunity for reconsideration."

O'Rane said nothing, and I was disappointed. I felt that, as he had got his own way, it would have been diplomatic and perhaps convincing to pretend that he was consenting to a compromise. Mrs. O'Rane looked at him out of the corner of one eye and pouted openly.

"We might just as well not be married, if you don't want me," she said.

"Come, come! Mrs. O'Rane!" I cried.

I am afraid that the mild protest only inflamed her.

"Well, he doesn't! The other night we were talking about marriage. Peter Beresford says that any man who loves a woman may do anything to win her; it doesn't make any difference whether she's married or not——"

O'Rane leaned forward and resumed his stroking of the dog's head.

"Perhaps it makes a difference to the woman," he suggested.

"Then David said," she went on, regardless of this interruption, "that men and women weren't justified in spoiling each other's lives by clinging on when one was tired of the other."

Every word was purposefully clear, and at the end she paused invitingly. O'Rane sprang up with a ring of laughter and held out his arms to receive her.

"Sweetheart!"

She made no movement until he had come a pace nearer, then she stepped unrespondingly aside. O'Rane's hands met on the marble of the mantelpiece.

"I—missed you," he said with a little breathless laugh.

I could not turn to see Grayle's face, but I was rigid with horror that such a trick should be played on a blind man. Gradually what she had done dawned on Mrs. O'Rane, and she threw her arms convulsively round her husband's neck.

"God forgive me!" she whispered. "Oh, my darling, I'm mad! I don't know what I've been saying!"

I turned to Grayle and asked him for a cigarette. A moment later I heard a car stopping at the door, and Beresford was helped into the house after his drive.

From time to time throughout the meal (whenever, perhaps, Mrs. O'Rane was trying to make amends), my mind went back to the scene. The O'Ranes' outlook and temperament were so dissimilar that I could see no common ground between them. The outsider never knows why any two people marry and is content to believe in the existence of an affinity hidden from his view. These two were both so full of vitality, both so good-looking, and, above all, both so young that I tried hard to resist a feeling of melancholy and to persuade myself that I had been an inadvertent eavesdropper at the oldest and most trumpery quarrel in the world rather than the witness of an inevitable breach. The long windows on either side of the room were warmly curtained in flame-coloured silk; the two fires glowed comfortingly on to their half-circles of chairs and sofas. Mrs. O'Rane, who could make a story out of nothing, poured out an endless stream of anecdotes against herself. When dinner was over and we left the dais for a distant view of high-hung chandeliers reflected softly in the gleaming surface of the long refectory table, I could not but be reminded of the Grail scene in "Parsifal."

The discordant note, the one persistently discordant note, was struck by Beresford. Alien in mind from the rest of us, he neither forgave nor forgot the contemptuous toe which had once searched his body for signs of breakage; and after dinner he withdrew to a far divan and spent the evening conversing in whispers with Mrs. O'Rane, who sat by him on a footstool, while he played with her long amber necklace. The rest of us reverted to a wholly undergraduate disputation, led by O'Rane on the theme of my own unexpected fortune and developed by me into a disquisition on education and the art of healing, though every question and view was put forward in the hope of making my host expound his own philosophy.

"You can't get efficiency without organisation," Grayle insisted as we laid the lessons of the war to heart. "Nothing can hold together without discipline. Look at Germany."

For myself, I have always regarded German organisation as the over-advertised co-ordination of the largest number of second-rate intelligences, but the criticism was taken from me by Beresford, who interrupted his own conversation to inform the room at large that it was one thing to teach a man how to shoot and quite another to be sure that he did not end up by shooting his own officers. Mrs. O'Rane held up one finger and pursed her lips, only to let them break a moment later into a smile.

"Efficiency is the gravest menace that the war holds over us," said O'Rane reflectively. "Whenever I've met it, it means being unkind—with Government sanction—to some one weaker than yourself; Jesus Christ would not have been tolerated by the Charity Organisation Society, all the bourgeois press would have said that He was pampering the incompetent and maintaining the survival of the unfit. Efficiency frightens me."

Whether he was speaking seriously or in paradox, he had struck a note of idealism which jarred on Grayle, who threw away his cigar half-smoked.

"If we don't learn our lesson out of this war, we don't deserve to win it," he answered, reaching for his stick.

"But what is the lesson?" O'Rane asked, more of himself than of us. "Do you men find that you think best at night?" he went on reflectively. "There's less distraction ... and I'm always thinking at night now. I would say that every man who comes out of this war alive is a reprieved man and that we don't deserve to win it unless we learn that the only crime in all the world is cruelty.... If we can't affect others, we can at least affect ourselves. It's no use waiting for an act of parliament to make you humane; if you're prepared to jump into the river to save a child from drowning, you must be prepared to jump through a window to save it from starving." He shook his head and turned to me. "But how you're going to teach that, sir, even with your million a year to endow schools.... The Church has had Peter's keys for nearly two thousand years, but how many of us would literally pick a man out of the street, turn on the hot water for him, lend him a razor and a rig-out, keep him in funds till his ship comes home...." As he paused, I looked beyond him to the sofa where Beresford lay idly fingering Mrs. O'Rane's amber beads. "Of course it's all figurative and the gorgeous imagery of the East and that sort of thing, but I don't know how any man could remain a professing Christian for two minutes if he didn't believe that Christ would bathe the feet of the first tramp on the road. That's far more important to the human race than the Crucifixion. But then Christ was always poor, and you can't begin to be charitable until you've known what it means to be poor." His voice sank and grew silent. "I'm boring you, Grayle!" he exclaimed penitently, as a boot creaked on the polished floor.

"I must be getting home," was the answer, following hot-foot on an ill-suppressed yawn. "Boring me, indeed? Enjoyed it all immensely." He got up and walked towards Mrs. O'Rane, to whom he bade an elaborate good-bye, while I followed slowly behind, wondering how such a woman ever came to marry such a man. "I shan't see you this side of Christmas, I suppose?"

She looked up a little negligently without releasing Beresford's hand.

"But I thought I was dining with you on Friday?"

"I understood you were going to Melton."

Mrs. O'Rane's expression became blank.

"I must think about this," she said. "Yes. I don't know how long it'll take me to tidy up things here.... Oh, I shall certainly be in London on Friday. David darling, you understand that I can't possibly get away at a moment's notice—any more than you can."

Her husband nodded.

"Come whenever it suits you," he said, as he walked on ahead to open the door for us.

Grayle lingered behind for a moment in the middle of the room.

"You mustn't stay on my account," he said to Mrs. O'Rane. "It won't be a party, you know."

There was a moment's silence; then she laughed provocatively and gave a mischievous, sideways glance at Beresford, which only Grayle and I saw.

"Jealous?" I heard.

"Not a bit. I shouldn't like you to come, though, if you were simply going to be bored."

"Oh, if you'd rather I didn't come, I won't."

I passed into the street and out of earshot. As I shook hands with O'Rane, Grayle joined us, and we walked towards the House on the look-out for a taxi. He was silent at first and then started to discuss the evening communiquÉ from the Front. I could not help wondering whether he, too, in middle-aged company under the penetrating chill of an autumn mist realised that it was beneath his dignity to be flirting with O'Rane's young wife and doubly ridiculous to be taking it seriously and devoting an evening's ill-humour to the enterprise.

"Do you care about dining on Friday?" he asked me suddenly. "Mrs. O'Rane will be there, and I'll rope in some more people."

3

Ever since his return from South Africa, Grayle had occupied a small old house in Milford Square, with a bleak, discouraged garden bounded at the far end by a private garage. I always wondered how he confined himself in so small a space, for his turbulent flaxen head seemed to scrape every ceiling and it was impossible for anyone to pass him on the stairs or in the doorway or corridor. When Guy Bannerman was required at the last moment, as now, to fill an unexpected gap, his loose-knit, centrifugal body seemed to take up every cubic foot of space not already appropriated to Grayle's use. But as a rule Guy was not allowed to leave the big work-room over the garage where he covered himself and his clothes in three different shades of ink and industriously "got up" his master's subjects and wrote his master's speeches, while Grayle himself devoted his talents to cultivating personal relationships, or, as his enemies would say, to intriguing, from a superstition that, if he ever let slip a conspiracy, it might not return to him again.

The party was small, the dinner perfectly cooked and served. This, at least, I had learned to expect from Grayle.

Mrs. O'Rane was on one side of me, and I asked how soon she was going to Melton, as I had shortly to attend my first meeting of the governing body. To my surprise I heard that she was not going at present.

"You see, there's my Belgian work," she explained, "and Peter can't walk yet, and I can't very well leave Mr. Oakleigh to the care of the servants. Besides I've got an awful lot of other things to do." She nodded across the table at Lady Barbara Neave. "Mr. Lane's written a duologue, and Babs and I are acting in it at the Regency. And I've got a stall at the Albert Hall in November, and I'm sure to be wanted for the Imperial Hospital Fund tableaux. They can't get on without us, can they, Babs darling?" Lady Barbara jerked her fair head quickly and returned to her conversation with young Lane. "David was quite right, too; I should be at a loose end at Melton."

Her reasons flowed easily, but they were not consistent with her earlier attitude.

"I thought you'd fixed it up the other night," I said.

"No. We had another talk after you'd gone. It's only three months, and, if he really wants me—" She broke off, leaving me to surmise that she was engaging in a trial of strength with her husband. "This is quite a pre-war dinner, isn't it? I love dining with Colonel Grayle; he's one of the few people who hasn't got the war on the brain. I do get so tired of war-talk, war-economies, war-work. I wish the thing would end, but Colonel Grayle says it will never end while the present government's in power; and Peter says there'll be a revolution when it does end, so it's a cheerful look-out either way. Don't you think Peter's improved since he fell in love with me?" She turned to look down the table with the rapid movement of an animal, and the lamps seemed to strike sparks of gold from her closely coiled brown hair. "It takes people different ways; Colonel Grayle will hardly speak to me to-night, just because I invited him to dinner and then forgot all about it."

"Mrs. O'Rane," I said, "may I tell you that you talk a great deal of nonsense?"

She darted a glance at me and then opened her eyes very wide, drawing down the corners of her mouth.

"Ah, you're hating me now! And I thought you were surrendering to my well-known charm. I have got an incredible amount of charm, haven't I?"

"We were talking about Melton," I reminded her.

"George—our friend George Oakleigh, I mean; he's known me all my life—," she went on, imperturbably munching salted almonds, "George says that, as part of his education, every man ought to marry me for just one month."

"Actually you've been married two and a half, haven't you?" I enquired. "Perhaps you haven't arrived at the full inwardness of George's criticism."

She pouted like a child under reproof.

"I suppose you both mean something horrid." Her eyes lit up mischievously. "I must tell George I've found an ally for him. He's always rather loved me, but he says quite definitely that he never wanted to marry me even for a week. He's always telling me so; that's why we're such friends. I'm afraid you'll never even rather love me; and I'm ready to take such a lot of trouble with you."

Mrs. O'Rane's voice is faultlessly clear; I noticed a lull in the conversation and discovered that she and I were performing a duologue for the diversion of our fellow-guests and the exasperation of our host.

"Has George told you that you think about yourself too much?" I asked, as a self-conscious murmur rose once more around us.

"Oh, if you want a list of my bad qualities, go to your niece. I'm not such a success with serious people, and Yolande talks about 'Ministers,' when she means 'the Government,' and '25 George II,' when she wants to quote some musty old law; and she considers herself a political hostess because she once bribed the Committee of the Aborigines Protection Society to meet the Governor of the Seychelles at dinner. Yolande would start a salon on one poet and two private secretaries! Oh, I know she's your niece, but you can't help that." She paused to draw breath. "George only thinks that I'm second-rate."

"I think that you're deliberately second-rate," I said. "Which is a pity. If you'd ever got to grips with life, if you'd suffered or been in love——"

"D'you mean that I'm not in love with David?"

"You're still trying on emotions in a room full of mirrors. By the way, we went through all this candour and self-absorption in the 'nineties, and I think people did it better then. If you'll take advice from a comparative stranger, twice your age, drop all this patter about this man and that being in love with you."

Mrs. O'Rane became suddenly majestic.

"You mean I'm behaving disloyally to David?" she demanded.

Her majesty was as superficial and unconvincing as everything else about her.

"My dear young lady, if you must try these airs and graces, don't try them on me," I begged, watching curiously to see whether there was any criticism she would resent so long as it was focussed on her.

She turned slowly away with everything of affronted dignity except its essence, exactly as I had expected her to do. A moment later she turned to me again, but by that time Lady Maitland, whose vigorous head and neck always makes me think of a lioness that has been rolling in French chalk, had first asked me to find a place in my office for her third boy, who was leaving school at Christmas and seemed too delicate for the army, though he was exceptionally quick at figures—just the man that the Treasury wanted—and then enquired what I knew of the young Beresford who was staying at "The Sanctuary." She would like me to bring him to see her as soon as he was able to get out. He was a poet, she understood; very wrong-headed about the war, but a good talker and interesting to meet.... She had a small party on Thursday; that man Christie, who had been removed forcibly from the House for calling the Speaker a liar and refusing to withdraw, a ritualistic clergyman who was in conflict with the Court of Arches, an obscure traveller who had proceeded on foot from Loanda to Port Sudan, the managing director of the Broadway music-hall and a novelist whose name she had forgotten.

(I may here say that I went and was given the opportunity of stroking all the lions' necks twelve hours before the proletariat caught sight of them and of trying to explain Lady Maitland to several little knots of bewildered Scandinavian and Dutch delegates and some self-conscious and incorruptible Labour Members who had either resigned from the Ministry or hoped to get into it. What Lady Maitland thought of the lions, they and we knew at once; what the lions thought of Lady Maitland they had hardly time to formulate before being hurried away to tea at Ross House, dinner with old Lady Pentyre and supper at Mrs. Carmichael's. I have found it easier never to refuse anything to Lady Maitland, but I hesitate to reckon how many times in a political crisis I have been persuaded to lead political aspirants to school. When O'Shaunessy was returned as a Sinn Feiner and refused to take his seat, I, who had met him in America five and twenty years before, was deputed to bring him to luncheon and Federal Home Rule with the Carmichaels, dinner and a united-Ireland-in-the-face-of-the-enemy with the Duchess of Ross. There was to have been a patient search for compromise at Lady Pentyre's next day, but O'Shaunessy shook his head at me over the brim of his tumbler and confided that these people gave you too much talk and too little to drink.)

"You'd better get Mrs. O'Rane to bring Beresford," I said. "I hardly know him."

"Someone must get hold of him before it's too late," Lady Maitland continued gravely, and I could see that he was going to be adopted, whether he liked it or not. "I hear he's got great ability, and it's all misdirected."

"I'd never heard of him before," I confessed. "But then I don't read modern poetry."

"I heard of him from our host—this is between ourselves, of course—; there was some question of prosecuting him again for one of his pamphlets." She raised her voice to demand confirmation of Grayle, but he would only shake his head rather irritably at her want of discretion and say that it was not in the province of his department. "I must talk to dear Sonia about him," she went on, "and we'll arrange a little meeting."

Not only have I led promising statesmen by the hand, I have myself of late been alternately schooled and courted in a way that was hardly known to me before the war. It is partly due, I suppose, to the suspended animation of the Caucus, partly to the increased number of groups and their social backers. As Lady Maitland convoyed the other women to the drawing-room, Grayle threw his sound leg across the shattered knee and told me he was not at all satisfied about our reinforcements. At that, after but five weeks in England, I knew what was coming. Guy Bannerman, with the deep, baying voice of a hound, supplied the dwindling figures of the daily returns, I criticised the waste of resources in men and ships on secondary fields of war, Grayle opined that the country would never appreciate that it was at war until every man was mobilised in the field, the shipyard or the shop, and Maitland took the safe but irritating and unhelpful line that Kitchener knew what he was about and that we must leave it to him.

I preferred to move away and talk to young Lane about his new play, but Grayle quickly recalled me with an exhortation to join him and his friends in their effort to galvanise the Government to action. It was the first of a long series of appeals which terminated a year later with the unblushing bribe of an office which I had as little fitness or right to receive as Grayle to offer. I was content to take refuge in Maitland's advice to leave it to the Government (alternatively to "trust the P. M."; a surprising political retrogression for a man of his antecedents), only adding that one Government should not have to shoulder single responsibility for the joint blunders of all the Allies.

"It's something to cut your losses," said Grayle shortly and with an air of disappointment, "to drop a mistaken policy when it's proved to be mistaken. That's what I want to see done; and that's what this gang of yours won't do. You watch out; France and Russia will make a separate peace, if we don't pull our weight. Let's come up-stairs."

On entering the drawing-room, Guy Bannerman strolled to the fire and entered into conversation with Lady Barbara Neave. Left with a choice of Lady Maitland and Mrs. O'Rane, Grayle pulled up a chair beside Lady Maitland, while Mrs. O'Rane looked at him like a chess-player considering his opponent's last move and then smilingly made room for me on the sofa by her side.

"I thought you were never coming up," she said. "I'm going in a minute, but Lady Maitland tells me she wants to meet Peter, and I waited to find out if you'd come, too. Any day next week."

"I shall be delighted," I said. "Friday's my only free night."

"Good. It will be just the four of us. Dear Sir Maurice is such a bore, poor darling; I really can't invite him. Now I must go. Shall we say somewhere about eight?"

As she got up, I looked at my watch and found that, for all the excellence of the dinner and the time that we were charged with spending over our wine, it was not yet ten. The Maitlands gave no hint of leaving, nor did Mrs. O'Rane vouchsafe a reason for her early departure. I saw her shaking hands with Grayle and heard him icily asking her to wait while he telephoned for a cab. With equal polite iciness of tone she assured him that she would find one in the Brompton Road. I saw her smiling mischievously to herself, as she walked out of the room; Grayle's smile, on his return, was mysterious, and I surmised that another trial of strength was in progress.

As we stood on the door-step an hour later, I asked him if we were meeting at "The Sanctuary" the following week.

"She said something about it," he answered, "but I shan't go."

"You're too old for this sort of nonsense, Grayle," I told him.

"What sort of nonsense?"

But before I could answer, a taxi crawled invitingly past the door.

4

I have never been able to cope collectedly with a verbal invitation and I am now too old to acquire the art. Otherwise I should have found an excuse for leaving my intimacy with Mrs. O'Rane where it was. I had dined the first time at "The Sanctuary" for the sake of her husband; he interested me, baffled me, refused to let me get to grips with him, and I did not intend to be beaten. His wife, I felt, for all her surface fascination and vitality, was rather a waste of time. And her retinue of fashionable actresses, elderly men about town and Guards subalterns was intellectually too exotic for me. I determined that my second dinner with her should be my last.

The door was unlocked, when I arrived, and Beresford was in undisputed possession of the long, warm library, though several large boxes of chocolates, an earthenware jar of expensive cigarettes, a parcel of books half out of their paper and string and a profusion of hot-house flowers dispelled any rash assumption that Mrs. O'Rane was being neglected by her admirers. And, whilst I waited for her, Beresford told me that the original party of four had multiplied itself by three. After a pause, in which he tried not to seem self-conscious, he asked whether I knew the O'Ranes well and rather wistfully volunteered his opinion that there was no real sympathy between them and that she was unhappy and unappreciated.

"I sometimes wonder why she married him," he murmured.

"Presumably because they were in love with each other," I said.

He shook his head with judicial gravity and an air of profounder knowledge than a middle-aged, unsympathetic man like me could hope to attain.

"I don't think they're happy. I should like to see her happier, she's made such a difference in my life. Women mean something more to me, somehow, since I met her ..." he confided, with a boy's curious passion to discuss his emotional state with anyone who will listen.

"She hasn't yet learned the difference between happiness and pleasure," I told him.

The new tempestuous disorder which the room presented in O'Rane's absence—paper and string and half-opened parcels abandoned when a more pressing call made itself heard—struck me as being typical of the woman. And she was late for dinner, which I consider impolite in a hostess.

Beresford must have seen a hint of disapproval in my face. "Has it occurred to you that all this racket is deliberate, that she wants to live in the present ...?"

He relapsed into silence and sat supporting his lean, long face with one hand. I felt Mrs. O'Rane had civilised him to some purpose and that, unless he lapsed from civilisation within the next quarter of an hour, Lady Maitland would find that her rebel-hunt had been in vain. I also felt that the sooner Mrs. O'Rane rejoined her husband, ceased dining with Grayle, going to the theatre with young Guardsmen and giving Beresford the idea that she was lonely, the better for all and especially for her.

Deganway and Pentyre, who evidently knew Mrs. O'Rane's ways better than I did, arrived ten minutes later. We were still awaiting our hostess, when Lady Maitland sailed in and, dispensing with introductions, opened fire at a distance of twenty paces.

"Darling Sonia not dressed yet? But, then, no one's ever known her in time for anything. How do you do, Mr. Stornaway? I suppose this is Mr. Beresford? Now, Mr. Beresford, I want to have a long talk with you; I hear you're a very original young man and I want to know why you're a pro-German."

Thus encouraged, Beresford roused himself to demonstrate the difference between sympathy with German atrocities and antagonism to war and the system of government which made it possible. I, who have heard him for a moment haranguing street loafers and have myself engaged in ding-dong argument with him, little thought to see him so completely routed by the sonorous enquiries of Lady Maitland, who put a question, announced parenthetically that she was a woman with no nonsense about her and flung out a second question before he could answer the first. Deganway stood polishing his eyeglass and murmuring sagaciously "Yes! Yes! That's what our good pacifists never condescend to explain." Pentyre lit a cigarette and confessed to hunger. Two more young officers, whose names I never heard and whom I have never met again, drifted in with a "Sonia not down yet?" and also lit cigarettes. I was glad when Mrs. O'Rane arrived to end Beresford's agony.

Without a word of apology for her lateness, she fluttered like a butterfly into our midst, brushed Lady Maitland's cheek with her lips and pirouetted slowly on her toes like a ballet-dancer.

"How d'you like my new dress, children?" she enquired. "Say you do or you don't, but please don't try to find reasons, or you're sure to go wrong. Peter's the only one here who knows anything about colour, Lady Maitland, and everything I wear has to meet with his approval."

She stopped her pirouetting in front of his sofa and stood, panting slightly and with shining eyes, holding her skirt out on either side and courtesying low. Beresford appraised it slowly, his head on one side, fingering the stuff and taking in every detail from the gold and silver band round her hair to the silk stockings and gilt slippers. An embarrassed maid awaited her opportunity of announcing dinner, Mrs. O'Rane threw her head back and smiled at me over her shoulder, with parted lips.

"Someone appreciates me," she laughed. For the first time I realised what her young and not very sinful vanity must miss by never being able to hear a word of pride or praise from her husband. Sonia O'Rane always reminded me of a child who cannot build a castle in the sand without dragging someone by the wrist to come and admire it. "I don't think you did that night at Colonel Grayle's," she said to me. "In fact it was very forgiving of me to ask you. I've never been so found fault with by anyone except David, and he's given it up since we married. I sometimes wonder whether it is because he thinks I'm perfect or only not worth bothering about now he's got me."

"I only recall saying that you talked a great deal of nonsense," I put in. "I stand by that."

"Well, that's a nice thing to say when I'd refused three invitations from people who were just dying to hear me talk. However, I suppose I'm a cultivated taste."

"And you only invited me in the hope of making me retract," I added.

"Let's have some dinner," she suggested, avoiding my challenge.

She spread out two gleaming white arms with the movement of a bird taking wing and waltzed to the table, calling to us over her shoulder to sort ourselves anyhow; the order did not matter as there were ten men and two women. As the others stood back for me to make my choice, I put myself on her left with Lady Maitland on the other side.

"When do you go to Melton?" I asked conscientiously, as we settled to our places.

She pointed a finger at Beresford.

"I can't leave my ewe lamb yet," she answered. "D'you know, last night I was up with him until nearly three, considering which I think I'm looking remarkably fresh to-night.... Besides, David hasn't asked me to come...."

Her clear and slightly over-emphatic voice travelled disconcertingly as far as Lady Maitland, who enquired with some surprise, "Does Mr. Beresford live here?" She was answered with a mischievous nod. "My dear, you know I always say right out whatever's in my mind; well, I don't think you ought to be doing that. With that blessed creature of a husband here——"

"But he brought Peter here and kept him here and finally left him here—whether I liked it or not, Peter dear. Besides, darling Lady Maitland, I have Mr. Oakleigh to chaperon us, and George drops in every few hours to see that I'm not disgracing his precious David.... George once said that I atoned for the number of my flirtations by the excellence of my technique," she went on irrelevantly. "I think he'd just fallen out of love with me and pretended that he never had been in love with me and never would be. You think I'm not good enough for David, don't you?" she demanded of me. "I think he got the wife he deserved, and he'll tell you that's the finest compliment anyone can pay him."

"I'll ask him, if I remember. I'm going to Melton next week. Have you any message for him?"

She deliberated with one finger pressed to her lips.

"Tell him—exactly what you think of me," she suggested with dancing eyes. "It'll amuse him much more than a message."

"Are you going down to him this term?"

She shook her head.

"I'm too busy, and he doesn't want me, or he'd have sent for me long ago. Not that I should have gone, of course...." She glanced quickly round to satisfy herself that the others were absorbed in their own conversations; then lowered her voice and laid her hand on my sleeve. "Mr. Stornaway, you do agree with me that it's absolute rot for him to be there, don't you? Old Mr. Oakleigh's offered him any money he wants—again and again; I've got five hundred a year from father; he could wipe out what he calls his debts and live here with the utmost ease. And he ought to be in London, he ought to be in the House; there are all sorts of jobs that he could get in the City.... If you want a message, tell him that he must choose Melton or me," she went on with a pout and a rising voice. "If he hasn't chucked Melton by Christmas, I shall chuck him. Tell him that I shall elope to Sloane Square—I don't believe anyone's ever eloped to Sloane Square, but it's the handiest place in the world; even the Hounslow and Barking non-stop trains stop there,—so sweet of them, I always think—I shall go there with Peter and live in his flat and star in revue where I shall be an amazing draw, you know; and Colonel Grayle would scowl at me from the stage box, and, darling Lady Maitland, you'd boom me and invite fashionable clergymen to meet me at lunch, and George would have his car at the stage door to take me home—I don't know that I shall wait till Christmas."

She paused for lack of breath and looked delightedly round the table. My expression, I imagine, was bored, Lady Maitland's perplexed; only poor Beresford's was unaffectedly pained.

"Mr. Stornaway's quite right," Lady Maitland said, when she had collected herself. "You talk a great deal of nonsense."

"I mean it, though."

"Rubbish, my dear."

Yet I believe that both she and I felt a current of discontent running underneath the froth of nonsense. Perhaps we shewed it, perhaps Lady Maitland reconsidered her judgement, for, when Deganway sat down to play rag-time after dinner and Mrs. O'Rane kicked the rugs aside and began dancing with Pentyre, she observed at impressive intervals——

"Darling Sonia is always in such spirits".... "I don't think it's quite the thing for a young man like that—quite good-looking, you know—to be living here; Mr. O'Rane will have a great deal to answer for, if there's any unpleasantness, and you can give him that message from me." ... "Tell him a husband's place is beside his wife.... But he must make her a home where she can live. I forget whether you were here that night—yes, you were! Well, Lady Dainton's quite right.... Just like the casual-ward of a workhouse...." "Of course, her mother brought her up atrociously".... "I really hope that she's going to have a family; it would just make the difference."

A week later I motored to Melton for the Governors' meeting. Town and school alike had become almost unrecognisable since my last visit three or four years earlier. Leagues of huts, miles of tents, acres of pickets stretched from the outskirts of Melton to the fringe of Swanley Forest; the drowsy cathedral town was alive with thundering lorries, and the billeting officer's handiwork was visible at eight windows out of ten. My car crawled apprehensively through the crowded streets and up the hill to a school which was half as it had been founded three hundred years before, half as it had been converted into a military academy during the last fifteen months. Great Court echoed with the clatter and scrape of hob-nailed boots, as the corps fell in and marched off to parade on the practice-ground; one group of signallers on the steps of the headmaster's house waved frantically to another group by the entrance to Great School, and, as I wandered into the Cloisters to kill time before the hour of our meeting, the Green was filled with pigmy recruits, learning their squad-drill from a husky but intensely business-like young sergeant. Only a handful of obvious weaklings wore the old conventional straw hat, grey trousers and dark jacket, and the open door of the Common Room at Big Gate shewed not more than two-thirds of the staff in cap and gown.

"War takes on a new horror and hopelessness, when you know that the schools of France and Germany present the same sight," I said to Dr. Burgess.

Our meeting was over, and he was conducting me round the unaging school buildings which I was thenceforth to hold in joint trust. The company drill on the practice-ground was giving way to a final parade, and we watched four hundred young soldiers from twelve to eighteen march erect and with set faces to the Armoury and from the Armoury to Great School for a lantern lecture on the Dardanelles expedition. A couple of dozen non-commissioned officers had fallen out and were awaiting a course in map-reading with their commanding officer.

"Thank Heaven! it will all be over before most of these boys are old enough to go out and stop bullets," I added.

Dr. Burgess stroked his long beard and shook a mournful head. "Some were yet in our midst when the appointed season came," he said, pointing to an already long Roll thumb-tacked to a wire-covered notice-board. "And they that have returned——" He sighed deeply. "David O'Rane enjoins me to say that he is within."

We shook hands at the door of a bachelor set of chambers in the Cloisters, and Dr. Burgess strode back to his house, murmuring mournfully into his beard. I knocked and entered to find O'Rane seated—as I might have expected to find a man with his physical dislike for chairs—in the middle of the floor with the big, patient head of his Saint Bernard on his knees. Miss Merryon was writing at a table in the window, and a low wicker-work couch by the fire was timidly occupied by a flushed and disputatious malefactor. She welcomed me by name to give the cue before making an excuse to withdraw. I apologised to O'Rane for disturbing him, but he dismissed the boy and turned with a smile and sigh of relief.

"We'd both had enough of it," he confessed. "That young man thought fit to play a practical joke on Miss Merryon, so I've been taking his moral education in hand, appealing to his self-interest."

He felt for a box of cigarettes and threw them to me. "Well?" I said.

"I remember getting held up at BÂle some years ago," he explained. "I was on my way home from Italy and I missed the eleven o'clock connection to Paris. There were crowds of us there—some on our way back from Italy, like me, some from the winter sports in Switzerland—all ages and races, on every kind of business or pleasure. The next train to Paris left the following day, and we had to reconcile ourselves to an uncomfortable night. Well, I've tried so many varieties of discomfort that I'm hardened and philosophical; I imagine most people would call these quarters uncomfortable, but they're nothing like what they were before Sonia took them in hand last summer."

He waved proudly at a pair of massive, discoloured velvet curtains, a bamboo overmantel and occasional table, wicker chairs half-buried in punt cushions and a threadbare carpet tattooed by generations of burning matches. I put up with the same sort of thing at Trinity, but I was then nineteen and I had no wife to accommodate. Mrs. O'Rane, I imagine, was not schooled to discomfort.

"I got a good deal of amusement and interest out of watching the others," he went on. "The French were the worst—voluble, excited, indignant, grabbing the best places and all the food they could lay hands on in the buffet—the way they always behave when they're travelling; the next worse were the Germans—they were ruder and more inconsiderate than the French, but not nearly so efficient. The Americans all set themselves to westernise Europe and started getting off protests by cable to Paris, ordering special trains and booking three times the accommodation available at any hotel. The English were bored, aloof, taking themselves and their troubles very seriously and refusing to share them with anyone. Well, when the last bedroom had been snapped up, there were still enough of us benighted to overcrowd the waiting-rooms and buffet, we were all suffering from a sense of grievance, and there wasn't enough food to go round. I got wedged into a corner with a plate of meat and looked on. One of the Englishmen commented loudly on the noise that a German made in eating soup. The comment was understood, so the German laid himself out to shew the sort of noise he could make when he tried. The Englishman wrapped himself in a ferocious dignity, finished his meal and lit a cigar, sending a cloud of smoke in the face of one of the Italians. My attention was then attracted by a brawl in the middle of the buffet; someone had imprudently left his seat to forage for food, and someone else had promptly bagged it. As they bickered and gesticulated and finally pushed each other about and the onlookers took sides and joined in, I said to myself, 'Lord God! this buffet is just like the world, and these fools are behaving just as we all behave, and we should all despise and laugh at ourselves as much as I'm laughing now, if we had any detachment, self-criticism, humour, logic or God's common sense.'"

O'Rane's black eyes lit up at the memory of the scene.

"I was telling that story to our young friend," he continued with his baffling smile. "Chivalry? Nothing doing. Moral sanctions and first causes? Nothing doing. He didn't believe in God, he wasn't going to Hell, if he misbehaved himself, so why in the name of reason should he bother?... But I should think I fixed him over my BÂle story.... We had a hideous night (it was too cold to go and sulk outside—which made the symbolism more perfect; you can't sulk outside this world, unless you're prepared to cut your throat); and we might have made it quite tolerable, if only we'd had a little imagination and kindliness, if we'd struck an international bargain and surrendered the privilege of eating soup noisily in return for immunity from cigar smoke in the eyes, if the chairs had only been given to the women and old men, if someone had only lent a hand to a poor boy who was coughing himself sick with asthma...." He whistled reflectively between his teeth for a moment. "Life's like a club, sir; there are rules and conventions and an endless mass of tradition—the things we don't do; but the rules were made so long ago, the conventions only aim at an irreducible minimum. Even so, it's better than treating the world like a company trading for profit, but we must modernise the rules. As you know, I always want to delete 'efficiency' from the English language; efficiency in the BÂle buffet would have meant that an organised party of four, back to back, could have downed the rest, grabbed all the food and cleared the till.

O'Rane's luminous black eyes were gleaming with mischief. Remembering my first sight of him, when he fought for his life in a Vienna cafÉ, I wondered whether any wife, reinforced by any mother, could curb his restless yearning after action, were it blacking the eye of an oppressor or slinging a disabled man on to his shoulders.... For all his cosmopolitan spirit I could not fit him into the Byzantine world in which Lady Dainton had brought up her daughter nor into the Merveilleuse society into which her daughter had gravitated.

"It's—it's really only a very big club," he murmured.

"Full of most undesirable members," I suggested. The BÂle story, I felt, would be wasted on Vincent Grayle.

"They're not acclimatised yet. Now, you'd open the door for the most undesirable member of the Eclectics, if he had a game leg, yet you laugh at me if I pick up an injured man in the street and carry him home for treatment. God's name! Where's the difference? You're not acclimatised yet, you see. It's to your interest, too.... How is Beresford, by the way? Sonia's the most undutiful wife in the way of writing; I suppose it's natural enough, really; she doesn't like having her letters to me read by anyone else."

I never forgave the old men who advised and hampered me, pinning me to a career for which I was unsuited and quarrelling with me when I broke away from it. In my turn I have tried to refrain from advising and hampering the younger generation—only to find that the younger generation sometimes makes an astonishing fool of itself and that it is harder and harder to sit silent and unintervening when someone whom I like is on the verge of falling downstairs in the dark or of having his pocket picked. Commenting on the fact that he was at Melton, while his wife was in London, I warned O'Rane that, with their double portion of wilfulness and energy, he was taking unnecessary risks with his married life.

"I've not got much to go on," I admitted, "but that supper-party you brought me to...."

"That was exceptional," he objected. "And they were Sonia's friends. You were the only one I invited."

I reminded him of Beresford, Miss Merryon and perhaps three more obvious recipients of his charity. He coloured slightly and told me that it was an article of faith with him not to refuse help to anyone who asked. Then I could see that he was not being honest with himself, for he shifted his ground, concentrated on Beresford and asserted that his wife liked him to be in the house.

"But do you think he ought to be there?" I asked, following him on to the ground which he had chosen. "They're both young, attractive; your wife's a very fascinating and beautiful woman. She can take care of herself, of course.... It was in fact commented on at dinner the other night."

O'Rane wrinkled his nose in dissatisfaction.

"He's company for Sonia," he said weakly.

"You'd be company for her, if she came here or you went to live in London. Much better company, too," I added.

My tone may have betrayed more than I intended to convey, for O'Rane laughed.

"You don't like her friends? I don't care a great lot for some of them, but you must remember that she gave up a good deal to marry me—a very full life—and I can't give her much. What I can give her is the freest possible hand. That's why I haven't pressed her to come down here, though, God knows, it's lonely enough without her. By Easter, if not Christmas——"

"Won't you have given this up by Christmas?" I asked.

His face grew tired and perplexed, and he ran his fingers impatiently through his hair.

"I don't know. I owe the devil of a lot of money; and I should be damned body and soul, if I lived on charity when I could earn my own livelihood. We'll discuss it at Christmas. In the meantime, can you stay and dine with me in Common Room?"

His invitation was a reminder that I had already stayed perilously long, if I was to get back to London in time for a dinner engagement.

"See me to my car," I said, as I put on my coat. "Look here, don't think I'm a mere busybody. You and your wife are such a pair of children that you mustn't mind a man twice your age telling you, if he thinks you're behaving foolishly. I strongly advise you to throw this over at Christmas. Now not another word."

O'Rane walked in silence through the Cloisters with one hand on the Saint Bernard's collar. As we came into Great Court, he stopped abruptly.

"Look here, sir; understand one thing," he began. "If you think I mind or that I'm not grateful to you for speaking like this, I shall never forgive you. But you say Sonia's to be trusted to take care of herself. That's enough. If she wasn't——" He shrugged his shoulders—"she wouldn't be worth keeping. If she fell in love with—who shall we say?—Beresford and ran away with him, in God's name d'you think I should want to stop her? I admit I've only been married three months, but to me love's a thing of perfect, implicit trust. This is between ourselves, but last week George Oakleigh came down for Founder's Day and dropped a hint that Sonia was lunching and dining out too much with—well, I suppose there's no harm in saying it—Grayle. As with you, someone had commented on it at dinner. I'm afraid I couldn't pump up the slightest indignation. Grayle's rather in love with her. So's Beresford. So's that squeaky tame-cat, Deganway, of the Foreign Office. So's one of my boys here—George's cousin Laurie, who firmly believes that he brought me up to the scratch and made me propose—rather against my will. So's young Pentyre, so's half the Brigade. If I wanted to be jealous, sir, I'm afraid I shouldn't have time. As it is, I'm so proud of Sonia that I glory in seeing other people proud of her, loving her.... As for stray comments at dinner—I don't say it's right and I don't say it's wrong, but she belongs to a very modern school which goes its own way without regarding stray comments at dinner. But so long as we agree that she's to be trusted——?"

We had reached Big Gate, and he held out his hand to me with the mischievous smile which I was beginning to know so well and which always filled me with a sense of helplessness. As I looked at him with the October wind blowing through his black hair, I reflected that he must think me very old-fashioned to be surprised when a three-month-old wife boasted of the men who were in love with her and her husband derived a reflected happiness from her successes.

Driving back to London I felt that I was escaping mile by mile from a bewildering world of serious make-believe.

5

My engagement that night was to dine with Harry Merefield and to discuss something which, he said, he could explain better by word of mouth than in a letter. I was intrigued by the invitation, because Merefield at this time was of considerable account in the Foreign Office. We dined at his Club, and, as the only other person present was Barton, who had thrown up his work at Cambridge twelve months before and was now my official chief in the Treasury, I divined that they contemplated a deal in my person. The preliminaries were already settled, and, as we drank our sherry, Merefield confided that the Foreign Office wanted me to go out to America ostensibly to raise money for the War Charities Fund, in reality to carry on a campaign of propaganda; my knowledge of country and people would be invaluable and our relations had reached a point where we could no longer afford to do nothing. Would I think over the proposal?

"If this Press agitation goes on ..." he began grimly and lapsed into eloquent silence.

I must confess that I have never been able to understand what function Ministers proposed that the Press should fulfil; they set up a Bureau to control the supply of news and occasionally to restrain editorial comment, but their interest seemed to die when once the War Office had secured that direct military information was not to be disclosed and that discussions and attacks should not take place round the head of this or that commander. Valiantly they feared nothing, despondently they hoped for nothing from a somewhat despised organisation which, despite their contempt, believed in its own power and was capable daily of placing the same view before every man and woman in the country until a vague but obstinate conviction arose that "there must be something in it." The Press with a little diplomatic flattery, might have become the handmaid of the Government; with promptitude and vigour it could have been emasculated to the semblance of an official bulletin. Instead, Ministers treated it like an intrusive wasp, slapping at it with ineffectual petulance, ducking their heads and running away when it was angered, until Sir John Woburn and half a dozen of his fellows were left to suggest, condemn, support and attack, to push favourite ministers and policies, to be inspired by those same ministers and to indulge in superficial criticism and the promulgation of half-truths which were harder to overtake and refute than a substantial, well-defined lie. Though never a Minister, I am afraid that I must accept my share of responsibility, for, when the House of Commons abrogated its duty of criticism, reform or remedy became possible only by a Press campaign.

"I don't give Woburn credit for excessive modesty," said Merefield, "but it never occurs to him that his vile rags can have any effect abroad. Yet, if you say a thing often enough, it gets repeated. The French and the Russians are now beginning to ask what England's doing, what the Navy's thinking about, and why we don't do more.... Wolff's Bureau itself couldn't have a greater success than Woburn in making the French believe that we're sacrificing them to preserve our own trade. We've given America about as much ragging as she'll stand, and I want you to sweeten things. You do know the country."

I know enough of America to feel that she has always suffered, as Ireland suffers, from the characteristically English belief that because two people speak a similar language they must have an identic soul and that the Americans are a homogeneous Saxon race, estranged indeed from an equally homogeneous parent stock by a certain insolent independence imparted by General Washington to his turbulent followers, but Saxon in orientation and sympathy, essentially sound at heart. When Merefield asked me to go out, I knew that he could have found others better qualified for the work, but at least I was a man who never expected to find unanimity on the issues of European peace and war in New England, purest in Saxon blood and tradition, sensitive to every European repercussion and receptive of every thought-wave borne across the Atlantic; in the Southern States, with their political concentration on the negro within their gates and the Mexican without; in the North-West, watchful of Canadian encroachments; in the Far West, with its eyes set on a Japanese peril; in the Middle West, where the farmer of Illinois and Iowa lives and dies without coming nearer than at a thousand miles' distance to Pacific or Atlantic; in scattered, unassimilated lumps of disaffected Ireland or duly prepared Germany.

"They're getting tired of hearing what 'America' ought to do," Merefield continued. "People here won't see that there is no American people yet, hardly an American idea, only the vaguest groping after an American ideal. They've been snapping and snarling at Wilson over Belgium, over the 'Lusitania', over his notes—as if he had a mixed population of a hundred and ten millions in his pocket! I want you to explain that it's only our fun. After all, they've got their own Woburns; they'll understand."

My American friends were too numerous to allow of my accepting Merefield's facile diagnosis and treatment. I knew then, as I had confirmed later, that the commonest feeling in the American mind was a quiet but affronted indignation at British ingratitude. Of the organisations, the funds and charities, the work of humanity and succour that had begun in America from the first day of war, not a word was said in our press or speeches; over the hardships and inconveniences involved by our blockade, over the sense of grievance occasioned by our censorship of mails and cables, no sympathy was expressed or felt. When Russia was dependent on American munitions, when English credit in America was the hope and salvation of allied finance, we could find no more gracious form of acknowledgement than a sneer at a so-called proud nation which let its sons and daughters drown without protest and shirked the sacrifices of war in order to steal trade, to sell the means of destruction to others and to increase the ever-mounting accumulation of wealth. I am too old and cosmopolitan to have any right to be surprised, yet I always am in fact surprised by my countrymen's abysmal want of imagination and international courtesy. I approached my mission with the most unfeigned reluctance.

Merefield left me to think over his suggestion undisturbed, and before saying good-night I told him that, if he would give me a few weeks to order my affairs, I would gladly go for as long a time as the Foreign Office chose to keep me. Yolande and her husband had attended to my domestic requirements so admirably during my absence in Austria that I had no hesitation in entrusting them to her again and in surrendering the rest of my house for use as an office. My departmental work was gradually transferred to other shoulders, though at one moment I feared that the department itself was going to be extinguished. After dissipating numberless troops on secondary operations in every corner of the world except the western front, the Government found itself short of reinforcements for the great offensive which was to break the German line in the spring of 1916. The flow of volunteers was drying up, and I heard much excited gossip about an immediate measure of conscription. Grayle, I remembered, was very active and tried to commit me to an organised attack on the Government; as, however, even he admitted that no one but the Prime Minister could carry a compulsory service bill, I told him that he must be content with anything he could get. My department, or the younger section of it, was saved by a comic-opera compromise whereby volunteers were encouraged to enlist on pain of being conscribed, if they held back. To introduce a democratic note and make the figures imposing, all my youngsters were invited to attest; to ensure that the official machine continued in being, it was arranged that no government servant should be called to the colours without the leave of his departmental head. So, after a week's flutter, I was at liberty to go.

There was no secret about the fact of my mission, and Bertrand Oakleigh arranged a little dinner at the House to wish me good-speed. I walked back with him to his rooms at "The Sanctuary" and looked into the library to see if there was anyone about. George was asleep on a sofa, but otherwise the room was deserted.

"I'm waiting to see Sonia," he yawned, as I came in.

"With any luck she's out at a dance and won't be back till about four. I've induced Beresford to clear out, but I don't want her to be frightened or wonder where he is."

He broke off to yawn again. I asked him how he had contrived the eviction, and the yawn shortened into a smile.

"I didn't put it on the ground that he was falling in love with Sonia," he said, "because I suppose he knows that; I just told him that—a comment had been made.... D'you know, after that dinner, dear Lady Maitland called on me at ten next morning at the Admiralty, telling me to use my influence? And I may say that when Lady Maitland tells me to do a thing I do it. Well, Beresford is in the pulpy state where he'd cut his throat if he could protect Sonia's reputation in any way, little knowing the evergreen hardiness of that same reputation, and he went off to his own flat. Sonia will probably be very indignant with me this evening, but she's made her Peter much too lamb-like to be seriously interested in him any longer. Anyway, if she isn't indignant with me for one thing, she'll be indignant for another. And I seem to survive it comfortably. So that danger's over, though as a matter of fact there never was any danger...." He filled a pipe and lurched wearily round the room in search of matches. "The only danger for Sonia is from a man who'll bully her," he drawled. "When she was engaged to Jim Loring, he behaved like an extra lady's maid; she might still be blowing hot and cold with Raney, if he hadn't shewn her very definitely who had the stronger will. It was at the very beginning of the war, and he was quite ruthless.... Last time he saw her, poor old Raney...."

"You know them both pretty well, don't you?" I asked.

"Yes. And the next question is, why did they marry? I can't answer that. They were in love, but that's more a reason than an excuse.... Yes, I've known 'em both for years. And for years I've tried to restrain Sonia's destiny when I saw it going to her head. Oh, by the way, Beresford's by no means my only success. I don't know whether Grayle's a friend of yours, but I dislike him—always did, when I was in the House with him—and the other day I thought it was time to interfere; you couldn't stir a yard without running into them. This time I didn't bother about approaching the man—that would have been too great a waste of time,—but I talked to Sonia until she promised never to have Grayle inside the house again and never to meet him of malice aforethought. Which you will admit is a fairly comprehensive victory."

He looked at his watch and walked impatiently to the writing-table.

"Mrs. O'Rane seems to be a whole-time job," I commented.

"She's all that," he grunted. "Mark you, I'm fond of her in spite of herself.... But I'm fonder of Raney, and the pair of them seem steering for disaster.... I don't know. I may be all wrong. I'm a bachelor and I've never had to humour a woman.... Here, I've finished this. I'll walk with you as far as the club."

As I latched the door behind me, I asked what he thought of the life which O'Rane had decreed for "The Sanctuary." He smiled before answering.

"If you'd known Raney as long as I have, it would be just the thing you'd expect of him—all taken au grand sÉrieux, too, of course. As for Sonia, she'd consent to sleep in a doss-house, if she were doing it for the first time—a new experience, you know. She was prepared to put up with anything, I fancy, to get away from home and have a house of her own; and she'd have cheerfully accepted half a room in a workman's cottage when she married Raney. After four or five months of it, I should think it's beginning to pall; the caravanserai life wouldn't suit her for twenty-four hours in the day, she likes it for an hour after dinner—for more new experiences. I think, I think you'll find Raney will have to drop it.... But I don't know.... There are five things that are too hard for me, and the way of a maid with a man is the hardest of them all."