The first page of the paper contained a streaming headline—"Do It Now" or "Wait and See?" Underneath came an obviously inspired forecast of the new ministry with the old Unionist and Labour members back in place as to some eighty per centum of their numbers; the old Liberal office-holders were collectively abstaining, and their place in the party scale was filled by consequential nobodies and by the leaders of the Liberal "ginger group."
"If they've got rid of the brains, at least they've kept the dead-heads," George observed. "I don't see stability or long life here, Stornaway. Everyone knows that Woburn and the Press Combine turned the Coalition out, and now, before a single name has been submitted to the King, the Press Combine's at work devouring its own child. The new Ministry's too much tarred with the brush of the old, Balfour and Robert Cecil and the less featherbrained are to be pushed out of their offices some time before they get into them. It's going to be a very clean sweep."
I heard later that the attack on the elder Unionist statesmen was abandoned on the day when the Unionist party threatened to withdraw its support from the new Coalition unless newspaper attacks on its members ceased immediately.
"Is Grayle included?" I asked, as George drew an expressive finger down the draft list.
"He gets a new Ministry of Recruiting. At least, when I say that he gets it," George corrected himself, "this is quite unofficial, of course. He's suggested for it."
"I wonder if he'll get it," I said.
4
In London, more even than in the fabled Indian bazaar, the secret of to-day is the thrice-told tale of to-morrow. The same few thousand men and women migrate so regularly from one to another of the same few hundred houses that, if you let fall a piece of gossip at luncheon in Chesterfield Gardens, it will have taken wing to Portman Square and Hans Place by tea-time and will set tongues wagging over the dinner-tables of Westminster, Pall Mall and Piccadilly. By Saturday night the germ-carriers have spread themselves for a hundred miles to the west, north and south; before the week-end is over, the news may reasonably be expected to have reached Paris and, in these latter days, General Headquarters; and there has probably been more than one sly hint in the personal columns of the Sunday papers. Lady Maitland hears the story that very day at luncheon from the Duchess of Ross, who has met Gerald Deganway the night before at the Opera; he had been dining with Lady Pentyre, who had spent the week-end at Oxford with the Cutler-Blythes; young Haviland had come over to lunch on Sunday and had brought the story from All Souls'....
Deganway's name appeared most regularly in these lists, but I doubt if he had the wit to invent scandal; he was content to collect and hand it on during the hours when his energies might have been more disastrously employed at the Foreign Office. It was from him that I first publicly heard even a rumour of Mrs. O'Rane's escapade; George Oakleigh and I succeeded in stopping his mouth, and for a few more precarious weeks Milford Square sank back to its former insecure silence. Then the busy tongues got to work again, and within thirty-six hours I had heard six various accounts in as many places, starting with an early morning encounter in Hyde Park with my niece, who observed triumphantly, "Now I know why you haven't been talking about the great Sonia O'Rane the last few months."