Chapter III · BERTRAND OAKLEIGH (continued 2)

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!"

VI

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.