"It's for Lord Summertown to say," she answered impatiently. "I don't mind."
O'Rane nodded and began to walk up the stairs, while Sonia crossed the hall at a ragtime shuffle, humming a plantation song. As we reached the first landing, he remarked:
"I told you I was looking for an omen."
Before dressing he scribbled a note to Oxford, and, when we met in the drawing-room before dinner, I heard him tell Summertown that he would be ready to start by the end of the week.
In my uncle's phrase, women are the strangest of all the sexes, and I do not pretend to explain Sonia's frame of mind at this time. Perhaps O'Rane was right in thinking she must be allowed of her own accord to grow weary of the world that Crabtree and Summertown represented; perhaps she was piqued by his refusal to run errands for her; perhaps I am right in thinking she was at this time incapable of any deep emotion. It is all guesswork.
Crabtree took charge of the dinner that night in a hearty, efficient manner, though O'Rane and I suffered from the disability common to all late arrivals in a house-party: a mint of catchwords and private jokes had been coined before we came. It was impossible to understand without an explanation, and the explanation so often analysed the poor little jest out of life. Moreover, I was sleepy after my long drive, and the elderly girl whom I took in—I always suspected Sonia's guests of being selected as foils—persisted in discussing the higher education of women. As Valentine Arden observed half-way through when my indefatigable neighbour trained her batteries on him: "If a woman is good-looking, education is superfluous; if she is not it is inadequate." I was mortified to think how much I might have been spared if I had been able to frame that formula earlier in the evening.
When the ladies left us, I roused slightly with the effort of getting up and opening the door. Crabtree moved into the chair between Dainton and myself, and, leaning in front of us, whispered to Summertown:
"I've given him a stroke a hole all the way."
For a moment I did not follow the allusion, but, when Summertown shook his head and murmured "No takers,"—still more, when Crabtree hurriedly finished his second glass of port and reached for the decanter—I appreciated that he was seriously measuring hardness of head with his host, as he had backed himself to do before dinner in the billiard-room.