She brushed the low-clustering curls from her forehead with an angry little hand.
"Have you ever seen a shop-girl with two men on the pier at Brighton?" she demanded.
"My education was skimped," I had to admit.
"Well, you can make up for it now," she said, as Loring appeared and claimed her for the first dance.
I began making up for it next morning when the Lorings and Violet were at Mass. Refusing to breakfast alone in her room, Sonia raided a silent but amicable bachelor party in the dining-room, engaged it in conversation and inquired its plans for the day. None of us was anxious to shoot on the morrow of our journey, and after considerable deliberation she decided to play golf with Prendergast. They started off at ten, and by one-thirty Prendergast had had his devotion sorely tried.
"I told her to take a jersey," he confided to me in the smoking-room. "She wouldn't. She went out in a north-east wind with a blouse you could see through, and when we got to the links I had to come back and find her a coat. We got on famously till we reached the third tee, then she said she was too hot and I must carry the damned thing because the caddie's hands were dirty. I gave her a stroke a hole and was dormy at the turn; then she must needs say she was tired and insist on coming home. At the club-house she discovered she was hungry and sent me in to forage. I brought her out sandwiches, cake, chocolate, and milk." He checked the list with emphatic fingers. "She looked at them and said they weren't nice and she could hang on till lunch-time. Making a fool of a fellow," he concluded indignantly.
I murmured suitable words of sympathy and imagined that he had now learned his lesson. At luncheon, however, Sonia sat next to him and, with her innocent brown eyes looking into his, asked him to describe his work at the Foreign Office. When we left the table he was enslaved a second time. As the wind had dropped and rain was beginning to fall, she sent him to find a book she had lost; when he returned with it she was too sleepy to read and demanded bridge to keep her awake; no sooner had the table been set and three unwilling players dragged from their slumbers in the smoking-room than she decided the weather had cleared up sufficiently for her to take a walk.
"Anyone coming?" she asked at large.
Loring, Prendergast, Crabtree and I offered our services as escort—in that order and with a certain interval between the third and fourth.
"Well, run along and get ready," she ordered, "or the rain'll begin again. I shall go as I am."