"Till behind the fleeing legions rose the long, hoarse yell for loot."
O'Rane's luminous black eyes were gleaming with mischief. Remembering my first sight of him, when he fought for his life in a Vienna café, I wondered whether any wife, reinforced by any mother, could curb his restless yearning after action, were it blacking the eye of an oppressor or slinging a disabled man on to his shoulders.... For all his cosmopolitan spirit I could not fit him into the Byzantine world in which Lady Dainton had brought up her daughter nor into the Merveilleuse society into which her daughter had gravitated.
"It's—it's really only a very big club," he murmured.
"Full of most undesirable members," I suggested. The Bâle story, I felt, would be wasted on Vincent Grayle.
"They're not acclimatised yet. Now, you'd open the door for the most undesirable member of the Eclectics, if he had a game leg, yet you laugh at me if I pick up an injured man in the street and carry him home for treatment. God's name! Where's the difference? You're not acclimatised yet, you see. It's to your interest, too.... How is Beresford, by the way? Sonia's the most undutiful wife in the way of writing; I suppose it's natural enough, really; she doesn't like having her letters to me read by anyone else."
I never forgave the old men who advised and hampered me, pinning me to a career for which I was unsuited and quarrelling with me when I broke away from it. In my turn I have tried to refrain from advising and hampering the younger generation—only to find that the younger generation sometimes makes an astonishing fool of itself and that it is harder and harder to sit silent and unintervening when someone whom I like is on the verge of falling downstairs in the dark or of having his pocket picked. Commenting on the fact that he was at Melton, while his wife was in London, I warned O'Rane that, with their double portion of wilfulness and energy, he was taking unnecessary risks with his married life.
"I've not got much to go on," I admitted, "but that supper-party you brought me to...."
"That was exceptional," he objected. "And they were Sonia's friends. You were the only one I invited."
I reminded him of Beresford, Miss Merryon and perhaps three more obvious recipients of his charity. He coloured slightly and told me that it was an article of faith with him not to refuse help to anyone who asked. Then I could see that he was not being honest with himself, for he shifted his ground, concentrated on Beresford and asserted that his wife liked him to be in the house.