"Too much of an arriviste," I hazarded. "Too much on the make, too keen to get there."
She pondered my criticism deliberately.
"You were born there," she observed, as though explaining a distinction I ought to have appreciated.
"My dear Sonia, a bachelor has no social status," I said. "Whether he's received or not depends on the possession of respectable dress-clothes."
"Beryl was born there," she continued, following her own line of thought. "So was Violet, or Amy Loring. If you're the daughter of a successful brewer, packed off to London to get married——"
"This is morbid," I interrupted, looking at my watch to see how much longer we were to be kept waiting.
"That little cur talked as if it were my fault!" she cried in shrill excitement.
I found a note at the Admiralty to say that O'Rane would be grateful for a bed in Princes Gardens as the Gray's Inn rooms had been let. During dinner that night he made no mention of his Austrian expedition and seemed only interested to learn how the war had progressed in his absence. We discussed the changes in the War Office and Cabinet, speculated on the untried Haldane Expeditionary Force and came back eternally to the reputed infallibility of German arms. No man alive at that time will forget his thrill on reading that the massed might of Germany had been brought to a standstill before Liège. The engine of destruction was so perfect that a single pebble might seemingly throw it out of gear, and with the crude optimism of those early days we talked of the Russians hammering at the gates of East Prussia and the possibility of peace by Christmas.
O'Rane, unwontedly taciturn and out of humour, laughed scornfully.
"A five months' war when Germany knows that if she fails she'll sink to the level of Spain? We've got a superhuman job. Every man we can get.... I hope you'll forgive me, sir, I'm treating your house as my own and inviting a few men for a recruiting campaign——"