Sonia drew on her gloves and picked up her fan.
"If I ever am," she said despondently.
I lit a cigarette and adopted a sage, mature tone.
"As soon as you two have got anything to marry on," I assured her, "your people will recognize the engagement."
"We're not even engaged any more. Mother told him.... As if I were a child!" She broke off, pushed her chair back and began to walk towards the door of the supper-room.
"Go on," I said as I followed her.
"Mother told him he'd—he'd behaved improperly in putting such ideas into my head. Putting such ideas! Mother won't see I've grown up. And then David got very angry and told her I might consider myself free of the engagement or not, just as I pleased. And he would never mention the subject till I did. George, I'm thoroughly depressed and, if I talk to you any longer, I shall say undutiful things."
A few weeks later I prevailed on Bertrand to invite the Daintons to dinner. He had met Lady Dainton on the Committee of the War Fund—an organization for the benefit of men permanently injured in the Transvaal; he had also taken an active dislike to her as he did to all bustling, capable women. She had joined the Committee one day and captured it the next. The meetings were held at the house which Sir Roger had taken for the season in Rutland Gate, and within a week there was an imposing programme of concerts, bazaars and charity performances. It is bare justice to Lady Dainton, who initiated and controlled the organization in its smallest detail, to say that the revenue of the Fund doubled in the six months following her accession to the Committee. I am not sure, however, that this was any recommendation in my uncle's eyes.
"He's a bore, and she's a snob," he declared. "Don't we know enough such without gratuitously adding to the number?"
"I am asking solely on the girl's account," I said.