He shrugged his shoulders. "You must do something."
"Yes, but—messing about at the bottom of a mine? It would be cleaner for you and more amusing for me if you came and stayed with me in Ireland."
"Or with the Daintons in Hampshire. There's quite a run on me. Sonia's frightfully offended because I haven't been near Crowley Court for a year and a half."
Than O'Rane no man was harder to convince that he could ever be in the wrong.
"When people are engaged ..." I began.
Almost fiercely he cut me short.
"And the engagement laughed at, and you threatened with the door and blackguarded for taking advantage of a girl's youth.... And your letters held up; I was forgetting that. God! George, if you'd the pride of a cur ...!" He stopped abruptly, stretched his hand out for the cigarettes and lit one. "I went to Dainton," he continued more calmly, "and asked if he'd let me marry Sonia on a thousand a year—it was like bargaining with a Persian Jew over the price of a camel. He wouldn't commit himself. I told him I'd have the money two years after coming down from Oxford, and he stroked his fat cheeks and told me I didn't know the difficulties of making money.... Difficulties! As though Almighty God hadn't shot 'em down all round us so that we shall have something in life to overcome! And that from a man who inherited a brewery and let it down till he's glad to sell it at two-thirds the valuation of twenty years ago! Yes, the Daintons are washing their hands of—commerce. I told him—all this was in Sonia's presence—that I'd be judged by my own vain boastings. I'd come up in three years' time to show him if I'd made good, and if she'd wait.... Or if she wouldn't.... I left her a free hand...."
"It was only fair," I put in.
"To me, yes."
"To her."