"Are your people in town?" I asked, as I prepared to follow my party. Webster is a man I do not go out of my way to meet.
"Father is, but mother's tired of London, so I'm staying with Mrs. Ilkley. She's a model chaperon and all that sort of thing, but she will live out in the Cromwell Road. It's a fearful bore."
"A most respectable quarter," I commented.
"It's a rotten hole when you've got an hour and a half to dine and dress and get back here in," she grumbled. "I didn't try. I just changed in Fatty's flat; that's why he's late. The poor soul's only got one bedroom, so I monopolized it while he was gorging. By the way, that's not necessarily for publication, as they say."
"Why on earth did you tell me?" I asked, with the mild exasperation of a man who resents youthful attempts to shock his sense of propriety.
"I thought you wanted cheering up," Sonia answered airily. "You're so mid-Victorian."
"You're getting too old for this eternal ingénue business, Sonia," I said. "And yet not old enough to avoid coming a very complete cropper. Don't say I didn't warn you?"
When I got back to the box Loring was raking the stalls with his opera-glass. As Sonia and Webster came in, he gave a slight start and sat far back in his chair. No one else noticed the movement, but I had time to scribble, "She is going abroad immediately," on my programme and hand it to him before the lights were lowered. At supper he announced without preface that he proposed to spend at least part of the Season in London.
With the detachment of one who has never taken even social dissipation with the seriousness it deserves, it flatters my sanity to describe the condition of England in these years as essentially neurotic. In retrospect I see stimulus succeeding stimulus, from the Coronation year—when all expected a dull reaction after the gaiety of King Edward's reign—to 1912, when an over-excited world feared a reaction after the Coronation year. This dread of anti-climax caused the carnival of 1912 to be eclipsed in the following spring, and, when Loring invited me to assist him in "one last fling before we settle down," we found that 1914—with its private balls and public masquerades, its Tango Teas and Soupers Dansants, its horseplay and occasional tragedies—was bidding fair to beat the records of its predecessors.
For three and a half months we seemed hardly to be out of our dress-clothes. Valentine Arden, as usual, let his flat and took a suite at the Ritz, from which he descended nightly at the invitation of a seemingly inexhaustible stream of people with sufficient money to spend fifteen hundred pounds on a single night's entertainment. Nightly there came the same horde of pleasure-seekers, some of them girls I had been meeting regularly for ten years, at first sight no nearer to any settled purpose in life. I think it is not altogether the fancy of an ageing and jaundiced eye to see a strain of vulgarity spreading over Society at this time; for, though Erckmann chanced to be abroad, his flashy followers had established their footing and remained behind to prove that money can open every door. Lady Isobel Mayre, daughter of the Minister of Fine Arts, gave them an entrée to Ministerial society; the poverty of Lord Roehampton enabled them to add a Marquess's scalp to their belt, and the old distinction between smartness and respectability broke down. The prohibited dances and fashions of one year struggled to become the next year's vogue. To be inconspicuous was to be démodé.