"You'll be more esteemed as you are," O'Rane answered. "Better let me do the talking."
"Oh, you'll only be taken for an Irish immigrant," returned Summertown.
There he was wide of the mark. There is a story that O'Rane, in shovel hat and clerical collar, bearded the night porter of his own college at two in the morning and gained permission to call on one of the chaplains in Meadow Buildings. I have seen him successfully assume an alien nationality in Montmartre, Seville and Leghorn; while the first draft of American Rhodes scholars, scattered though they be to the ends of the earth, may recall the inaugural address delivered in hearing of the scandalized Cæsars by an alleged attaché of the United States Embassy.
They may remember a slight, passionate figure with black hair and arresting eyes who urged them in the name of their great Republic to resist all interference with their liberty on the part of the University authorities and to lynch any black men they found lurking around Balliol or St. John's. Robert Hawke, of Texas and Hertford, six feet five and proportionately broad, may not yet have forgotten the night when the imposture was discovered; he alone may be able to explain why, after pursuing Raney down Holywell with a loaded revolver and running him to earth in Hell Passage, he tamely consented to breakfast next morning with the man he had sworn to slay. The Rhodes scholars were a fair mark for O'Rane whenever he had an outbreak. Creevey, of Melbourne and Trinity, still preserves the peremptory note that bade him call next morning on the Junior Proctor, Mr. D. O'Rane, though the House Mission has probably long ere this expended the five-shilling fine for non-attendance at the first University Sermon of the term. To add one digression to another, I have never understood how O'Rane survived four years at Oxford without being sent down.
The Covent Garden skirmish was my affair, and after summary defeat I retired into private life. O'Rane's moral lecture was no more successful than my diplomacy: the Americanization of women went on unchecked—if indeed the American girl be as Raney saw her, a social prostitute who would sell herself to the highest bidder and give as little as possible in return; I privately believe the breed to be indigenous to the wealthier strata of English society. He failed and retired to the other side of the Atlantic. Between the two skirmishes came the intervention of Loring House.
I was taking pot-luck there one night when Lady Amy asked me in an undertone how Raney's engagement was progressing. I told her all I knew, and she broke a significant silence by observing:
"Oh, I just wanted to know."
It was not all she wanted to know, and I ventured to tell her so.
"Well, Sonia really is behaving rather extraordinarily," she went on. "I wonder her mother...."
"Lady Dainton accompanies her everywhere," I pointed out.