There was a certain want of ease about our meeting, for I fancy Sir Roger was as frightened of his host as I was of Lady Dainton. The two of us withdrew without prearrangement to the smoking-room and exchanged quiet confidences till it was time to dress for dinner. I sat next to Sonia at that meal and was sensible of an agreeable change in her manner. We had not met since her rupture with Crabtree, and I imagine that two years' retirement had given her leisure for salutary reflection. She was subdued and polite to people older than herself—cordial even to members of her own sex; and so little attention had she received in her exile that she was gracious to quite inconsequential men whose function in the old days would have been to hover deferentially around her, awaiting orders.
"I'm so glad its you and not a stranger," she was good enough to tell me as we went in. "How's everybody and what have you all been doing?"
I dealt with the comprehensive question through three courses, and at the end she asked with a momentary heightening of colour whether I had heard anything of O'Rane.
"I'm glad he's doing well," she remarked indifferently, when I had sketched his career from the Imperial Hapsburg cells by way of Mombasa to Mexico. "George, I suppose you thought I treated him very badly?"
"Even if I thought so, I shouldn't say so," I answered. "I imagine there are easier and more restful things in life than to be loved by Raney. Not that his devotion has aged you noticeably."
"My dear, I'm twenty-two!" She studied her own reflection in the silver plate before her. "When you see him, tell him to shed a tear over my remains," she went on mournfully.
"He's twenty-six himself," I said. "And Jim and I are twenty-nine, which is far more important, though I may say I now look on thirty without a tremor."
"Oh, age doesn't matter for a man," she answered, with a touch of impatience. "You've got work to do. When you're simply waiting for someone to take compassion on you ..."
"There is still hope even at twenty-two," I said.
"But when twenty-two becomes twenty-three, and then twenty-four, and then twenty-five.... It's rot being a girl, George!" she exclaimed, with something of the old fire in her brown eyes. "I always think—I'm not a Suffragette, of course—I always think if we could look forward to any kind of career——"