"Good night, Sonia, and many thanks," I said. "It was the star turn of the season."
"Good night, Bambina," said O'Rane. "See you again some day."
"Good night, dear one," she answered casually; and then, with a show of contrition, "I'm sorry we didn't have that one together."
"So am I, but it can't be helped now."
"There were such crowds of people I had to dance with," she explained.
O'Rane shook hands and came away with me. Perhaps he felt, as I did, that the explanation was in the nature of an anticlimax.
V
During the first half of the 1905 Season I saw the Daintons three times: after their ball it is hardly an exaggeration to say we met daily. Our new feverish intimacy was not entirely of my seeking, and I am free to admit that Lady Dainton's capable energy left me then, as it leaves me now, with a feeling of scared bewilderment, while the measure of Sonia's success in subjugating London came rapidly to be the measure of my dislike for her. When, however, my uncle fell a victim to internal gout and departed for Marienbad at the end of June, he left me a house, a box at Covent Garden, a voluminous correspondence and the financial welfare of the War Fund to engage my spare time. This last spelt Lady Dainton and afternoon meetings in Rutland Gate. I nerved myself to face the inevitable and wire an invitation to O'Rane to stay with me when term was over.
He kept me company till Goodwood, and one of our first acts was to dine with the Daintons. I say it in no ungracious spirit, but at this time it was hardly possible not to dine with the Daintons. Turn up the files of the "Morning Post" and you will read some four or five times a week that a very successful ball had been given the previous evening by Mrs. X., "who looked charming in an Empire gown of ivory silk brocade," that among those present were the "Duchess of This, the Countess of That, Lady Dainton and Miss Dainton," and that dinners were given before the ball by "the Duchess of Here, the Countess of There and Lady Dainton." Lord Loring and other well-known dancing men are reported to have looked in during the evening.
Sometimes I feel my life has been embittered by the failure of the "Morning Post" to distinguish me by name; not until I entered the House was I segregated from the herd of "well-known dancing men," and this was more a compliment to the parliament of a great, free people than to myself, for by that time I had bidden almost complete farewell to Claridge's and the Ritz, the Empire Hotel and those ill-constructed tombs in Grosvenor Place that were tenanted, upholstered and beflowered for a night between two eternities of desolation.