"Well, it wasn't your fat friend Webster, and it wasn't John Gaymer; they played poker before they could walk. I think you can guess now. Really, Pentyre, if you admit people of that kind to your house.... That girl will be the death of my poor mother. Thank goodness, Crawleigh's on his way home! D'you know, in the four years we've been nominally in charge of her we've been asked to have her removed from three different schools? Once it was for holding a table-turning séance in her bedroom after lights-out, and twice simply because they didn't know what to do with her. She's a holy terror. But I've got rid of her now, so let's have some dinner and forget all about her."
The three-hour discussion, which had been brought to an end by the dressing-gong, was only the latest of a long succession of family councils; but hitherto Lady Barbara had split the court of enquiry into factions and escaped between the feet of the disputants. On this, as on earlier occasions, she had won over her two aunts, but Loring proved himself to be of sterner stuff. "It's no use her saying that it's just as if she hadn't a father and mother of her own! She has,—and they'll discover it to their cost," he said. "The immediate point is that, if Barbara stays in this house, I go out of it. She's not in the least sorry. You think she's crying, but she isn't. I've seen her do that a dozen times when she wants to get round the servants. It's time some one else had a turn of her. If you believe in her repentance, Aunt Kathleen, you're welcome to her." While he dressed for dinner, the girl's clothes were packed and disposed in Lady Knightrider's car. She herself came to his door with a woebegone face, begging him to forgive her, for life with Lady Knightrider involved discipline, religious exercises and banishment for most of the year to Scotland or Monmouthshire. He refused and felt so small-minded at using his authority against a child that it was a relief to vent his ill-humour on a man.
"This is all very well," said Pentyre stolidly, as they sat down to dinner, "but I refuse to be bully-ragged because you can't keep your own cousin in order."
"I can't make out how you can be seen in the same street as Webster and Gaymer," answered Loring. "To me they're everything that's wrong in the life of the present day. Webster, Pennington, Lady Maitland, Erckmann——"
"You're so infernally narrow-minded."
"If it's narrow-minded to dislike a noisy little clique of rich cads who try to dominate society by being one degree more outrageous than anybody else."
A murmur of dissent made itself heard; but Loring warmed to his work, and the party divided into two camps and joined battle over the bodies of their friends. It was a stimulating encounter and afforded unrestricted opportunity for personal attack. For several years there had been raging a secret warfare which Valentine Arden compared with a tournament in a dark room between blindfolded combatants who did not know why they were fighting. On the one side was a group of influential and highly respected families led by the Lorings, the Knightriders and the Pebbleridges, on the other the cosmopolitans. They were an ill-defined host without leader or tenets. In every other capital of the world they had found their place as a wealthy and cultured class, excluded from the houses of the historic aristocracy but forming an artistic aristocracy of their own. In Paris, Vienna and New York Sir Adolf Erckmann was a social power; he would not, indeed, be found with the Princesse de Brise or Mrs. Irwin T. Churton, but he was known and reverenced in a world of music and pictures which did not know Mrs. Irwin T. Churton or the Princesse de Brise by name.
In England there were no such recognizable lines of demarcation. Erckmann was received by the Duchess of Ross, because she wanted him to subsidise a French theatre for London and hoped that he might be induced to take Herrig on a long lease; he was blackballed for the County Club, because the committee disliked his race, his accent, his friends and his too frequent appearance in the Divorce Court. With one foot in a Promised Land, from which the society of Paris, Vienna and New York had excluded him, Sir Adolf lifted the second; it was at this point that the battle was joined, and both sides fought blindly. The cosmopolitans were not always fortunate in their manners or their allies; and to Loring their very toleration meant the invasion of society by "a noisy clique of rich cads." Their antagonists were no less unfortunate in a few of their prejudices; and the cosmopolitans claimed with some reason to be fighting against a Philistine oligarchy. As there was not even a common ground of dispute, the warfare degenerated into indecisive skirmishes, and the discussion of it into embittered personalities.
"They're a bit hairy about the heel," said Summertown, "but they are alive, and some of their shows are great fun. Val can bear me out."