"The fact is, we're too old to stay the course," Loring said regretfully at supper one morning towards the end of June. "George, let me remind you that you and I are as near thirty-five as makes no odds. Amy, you're thirty. Violet, you're—well, you look about nineteen."
"Add ten to it," Violet suggested.
"We're all too old; we must give it up. You're all coming to Hurlingham with me next week, aren't you? And then we'll ring down the curtain and say good-bye to London."
"One must live somewhere," I said, with an uneasy feeling that his new way of life might involve my spending the greater part of the year in County Kerry.
Loring lit a cigarette and gazed with disfavour round the garish room.
"Either I shall marry," he said, "or else go and live abroad."
IV
The Hurlingham Ball at the beginning of July 1914 was the last of its kind I ever attended—probably the last I shall ever attend. We went a party of eight, as Loring wanted to offer O'Rane a complimentary dinner after his election at Yately, and Mayhew conveniently arrived in London for his summer leave as the tickets were being ordered. To an outsider we must have presented a curious study in contrasts. Amy Loring had confided to me her certainty that her brother would propose to Violet before the evening was out, and four of us were therefore in a state of watchful anxiety. Of the other four, the two girls spent their time affecting interest in a heated political discussion in which O'Rane and Mayhew, with a fine disregard of fitness, were volubly engaged.
"Well, I'll tell you something you don't know," said Mayhew, when we were by ourselves at the end of dinner and the last of a dozen preposterous stories had been exploded by O'Rane. "The Archduke Franz Ferdinand has gone with his wife for a tour through Bosnia——"
"Even I knew that," I said, as I cut my cigar.