"Yolande! My dear, I got your note and I've put off the committee till Friday," she cried, when our turn came and my niece surrendered to a resonant kiss on either cheek. "And dear Captain Manisty—there was something I wanted to see you about.... It'll come back to me. And Mr. Stornaway!" She surveyed me for a moment with her handsome square head on one side, then turned to a little group behind her. "My dears, we all thought he was dead! Mr. Stornaway, I want you all to myself, you're going to tell me all about your terrible hardships and, before you're a day older, you're going on my Prisoners of War Relief Committee." She turned again to explain me to the room. "This is Mr. Stornaway who's been interned in Austria all this time. He's going to tell us all about it.... Mr. Stornaway, it's a scandal, we can't get the Government to act. Now here's Mr. Deganway—you know him?—he's in the Foreign Office and he tells me that the question of the prisoners——"
She broke off to welcome two new arrivals with a surprised cry of "Lord Pentyre! And my dear Sir Harry Mordaunt!" as though she had not invited them. I shook hands with Maitland and was trying to see whom else I knew, when she returned and remorselessly introduced me to Vincent Grayle, with whom I have sat in the House for a dozen years. He was leaning on a stick, and I learned in a galloping exchange of biography that he had had one knee shattered in the Antwerp expedition and was now at the War Office, "cleaning up the mess made by the professional soldiers."
"But what were you doing out there at all?" I asked, clinging to him for a moment before Lady Maitland could present me to anyone else. We had been contemporaries, if not friends, at Eton and Trinity, which meant that he was past fifty.
"Much too good a war to miss!" he answered with a laugh, hobbling away to be introduced to a young bride in half-mourning who had already collected two young Maitlands, Pentyre, Deganway and George Oakleigh.
"I expect you find everything a bit changed," said Maitland earnestly, glancing at his own uniform and speaking as though the war were a secret in which he was doubtfully initiating me.
"Grayle's much the same," I answered, looking enviously after the viking figure with the blue eyes, pink and white cheeks and corn-coloured hair.
There was a moment's silence, as my hostess mentally called the roll and I strolled away before her husband was ready with another platitude.
"Eleanor Ross is always late!" she complained. "Well, you haven't altered much, Mr. Stornaway."
Nor had she, I answered. The war seemed only to have turned her tireless energy into new channels. Whereas she had once called for the heads of Nationalists, strike leaders and, indeed, anyone with whom she chanced to be in temporary disagreement, she would now, I gathered, be content with the public execution of the Prime Minister, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Sir Ian Hamilton. She seemed the motive power of as many committees as ever; her house was the meeting-place of as many incongruities as before, and she was prepared to yoke the meanest of us to one or other of her charities.
"We must have a talk about the Prisoners," she said, with one eye on the door. "The Government will do nothing, but what do you expect?"