"I hardly felt this was a normal household when I was here before," I said.
In the light of the hall I could see his black eyes gleaming with laughter.
"You should hear old Oakleigh!" he suggested. "'It's a phase, my dear boy. You'll grow out of it. You see the devil of a lot of strange things, if you live to be as old as I am.'" He paused to laugh at his own exquisite mimicry of Bertrand's disillusionised, pontifical manner and gruff, disparaging voice. "Well, he wouldn't eat a twelve-course dinner with a starving man opposite him.... It makes life so much easier, if nobody thinks you're quite sane. Won't you go in?"
"Does your wife enter into the spirit of it?" I asked, as I looked at the silk curtains bellying away from the white walls.
He evaded the direct question almost apologetically.
"It's a big change after the life she led before the war," he conceded, "but then the war itself is a big change."
He had mentioned a party, but I was hardly prepared for the army of occupation which I found in the library. Every chair at the long table was filled, and the guests had overflowed and scattered throughout the room, bearing their plates and tumblers with them. Mrs. O'Rane jumped up from her place between Beresford and Deganway, making me welcome and apologising for having missed me before.
"This is such an irregular ménage," she exclaimed in a clear, high voice that dominated the clear, high voices around her. "David's at the House so much, and I spend my days serving out clothes to Belgian refugees, or finding them houses and work, or getting up concerts and things to raise money for them, but somebody's sure to be at home at some hour of the night. This is our house-warming, and of course David forgot all about it." She twisted her arms round her husband's neck and kissed him with an ecstasy that told me stabbingly of something that had been left out of my life, "Admit you did, sweetheart, or you won't get any supper."
"I remembered! I invited Mr. Stornaway," he protested. "And you're going to look after him while I strum. You seem to have got some people here, Sonia. And there's a sort of hint that some of them have been smoking."
The crowd, the heat, the babble of voices and the fog of tobacco smoke robbed me of resistance and individuality. Before I had been three minutes in the room, I was eating a meal which I did not need, drinking hock-cup which I knew disagreed with me and trying to carry on two conversations and at the same time to see who was already there and who was arriving. Lady Maitland introduced me volubly to a watchful-eyed, supercilious boy whose first play, she assured me, had taken London by storm. Had I seen it? If not, I must go at once; and she refreshed her memory of its name by reference to the author. When he escaped in bored embarrassment from his own biography, she explained loudly a second time that that was Eric Lane, the great coming dramatist, and confided as loudly that he was desperately in love with Babs, little Babs Neave, Barbara Neave, Lady Barbara Neave—it was no use my pretending that I didn't know her—and that Crawleigh was at his wits' end, because it was quite out of the question for them to marry, but Babs was such an extraordinary girl that, if you opposed her, you might simply drive her into his arms.... Lady Maitland shook her vigorous grey head with an air of concern and at once asked me to meet "both the silly children" at luncheon, because it would interest me....