"You know it yourself," said Edith. "We're on the brink of the stupendous catastrophe, and we're quite unprepared, and we won't attend even now. We shall be swept off the face of the earth, and if I could buy the British Empire to-day for five shillings I wouldn't pay it."
Dodo got up.
"Darling, I seem to feel that you lost your match at golf this afternoon," she said. "You are always severe and posthumous and pessimistic if that happens. Didn't you lose, now?"
"It happens that I did, but that's got nothing to do with it."
"You might just as well say that if you hit me hard in the face," said Dodo, "and I fell down, my falling down would have nothing to do with your hitting me."
"And you might just as well say that your dinner was put off this evening because the Ambassador really was ill," retorted Edith.
Dodo woke next morning to a pleasant sense of a multiplicity of affairs that demanded her attention. There was a busy noise of hammering in the garden outside her window, for though she was the happy possessor of one of the largest ballrooms in London, the list of acceptances to her ball that night had furnished so unusual a percentage of her invitations, that it had been necessary to put an immense marquee against the end of the ballroom fitted with a swinging floor to accommodate her guests. The big windows opening to the ground had been removed altogether, and there would be plenty of rhythmical noise for everybody. At the other end of the ballroom was a raised dais with seats for the mighty, which had to have a fresh length put on to it, so numerous had the mighty become. Then the tables for the dinner that preceded the ball must be re-arranged altogether, since Prince Albert, whom Dodo had not meant to ask to dine at all, had cadged so violently on the telephone through his equerry on Sunday afternoon for an invitation, that Dodo had felt obliged to ask him and his wife. But when flushed with this success he had begun to ask whether there would be bisque soup, as he had so well remembered it at Winston, Dodo had replied icily that he would get what was given him.
These arrangements had taken time, but she finished with them soon after eleven, and was on her way to her motor which had been waiting for the last half-hour when a note was brought her with an intimation that it was from Prince Albert.
"If he says a word more about bisque soup," thought Dodo, as she tore it open, "he shall have porridge."