The summer of 1905, my first season, was undisturbed by him, though for two and a half months I danced, on an average, in eight houses a week. It may be that the future will find us too sober and too poor to revive the glories and excesses of those days, and in that case I am glad I grasped my opportunities while they lay within reach. As Bertrand predicted, I was to outgrow the phase, but, ere disillusion came with weariness, the life of those summer months was a long, unbroken dream. Now the men are mostly dead, the women widowed: the great houses are closed, the orchestras disbanded and bankrupt.
Yet for a moment at a time they still live. A hansom once more jingles through some Square to a striped awning and length of red carpet. Throwing the door open, Loring and I descend with our coats over our arms, press through the throng of interested idlers, give up our hats, pocket a ticket, pull on our gloves and warily squeeze our way past the couples on the stairs. I have forgotten half their names, but the faces are still familiar, and the little jargon of the ball-room shouted from the door to the whirling dancers. "You free any time? Missing two? Right! Many thanks. I suppose you're booked for supper? Well, sup with me—early and often." An odd bar of a forgotten waltz is enough to call the whole scene into life—the blues and whites and pinks of the dresses, the line of prim, weary chaperons round the walls, the lazy, stereotyped chatter, the drowsy scent of flowers, and the wonderful size and softness of the girls' tired eyes as daylight broke coldly into the yellow, stifling rooms.
There was a happy-go-lucky cameraderie about it all. An invitation once accepted left you a marked man. "Are you going to the Quentins' on Friday? Well, come with us! We've got one or two people dining first.... Eight-thirty. I don't know whether you got my name.... Oh, that was rather clever of you! I never listen myself. You'll find the address in the Red Book, and I'll push you along and introduce you to mother when she comes up from supper. Have you been selected for the Fortescues' next week? Then we shall meet there...."
And so from April to May, from May to June. I could stand late hours and ball champagne in those days, the whole of my world was treading the same round, and at twenty-four it was the rarest fun imaginable. Ten years later finds the ardour damped, but I should like to hear "The Choristers" played once more, I should like to dance again with Amy Loring, to see her brushing back the dark curl that always broke loose over her forehead, to talk again our tremendous trivialities. And I would give much to hear—say—Lady Pebbleridge's butler thundering out the names at Carteret Lodge—and to see the men stepping forward in response....
It was at the Pebbleridges' ball that I met the Daintons again. The house was small and the crowd was large. I had half decided to go on to the Marlores' in hopes of finding more room there when I discovered Lady Dainton and Sonia, pressed into a corner and pretending to enjoy themselves. Lady Pebbleridge had invited them as she invited all her Hampshire neighbours, but they were still strangers to London and knew no one. I acquired merit by finding the girl some partners, giving Lady Dainton an early supper and, when the room cleared, dancing with Sonia and trying to remove the bad impression which her first London ball had left on her. She had come on from the second Court and was looking far too attractive to be left standing in a corner; moreover, ever since our passage to Egypt the winter before, I had enlisted under her colours against her mother and felt it incumbent on me to provide such consolation as lay in my power.
Beyond the statement that she had not seen nor heard from O'Rane in eighteen months, I gleaned little information in the course of my second supper on the subject of her chequered romance. At third-hand she learned that Raney's vacations were spent in studying English Industrial conditions; he had put in time as an unskilled worker on the Clyde, as an extra harvest-hand in Wiltshire, and finally—though I never learned in what capacity—as a miner in the coal-fields of Nottinghamshire. What his purpose was, neither Sonia nor I pretended to guess; I judged from her tone that she was aggrieved at his experimenting in manual labour when by merely expressing the desire he could have secured an invitation to Crowley Court.
"Does your mother...." I began tentatively.
Sonia shrugged her pretty, white shoulders.
"She says he can come and stay with us if he wants to," she told me. "It looks as if he doesn't want to."
"I'm fairly sure that's not the reason," I said. "But he's a wild, eccentric creature—as you'll find when you're married to him."