I have never known for certain who constituted our party that night. Four of us met in the hall; but we mislaid Sonia as we went to our table; and John Gaymer invited himself to join us until his own friends arrived. Between the dances, some twenty to forty people surged into our corner; during them, I was usually left with one compassionate neighbour. As in a dream, I talked to O’Rane with grave absorption about shell-shock treatment; then I listened as Sam Dainton was convinced against his will that he had spent the previous night in the hall of his hotel, because he could not remember his bedroom number nor his name; then Sonia plunged me in a morass of domestic finance, demanding how any one could keep herself, her husband and child on the pittance which David allowed her.
“And now I’m going to have another,” she added, as the saxophone uttered a warning bleat.
“Dance?,” I asked.
“No, baby, of course. . . . Do knock some sense into David’s head. . . . Good-bye-ee.”
As she slipped away, I found myself alone with a pretty little dark-eyed girl, precocious and unbalanced, whom I remembered with difficulty as Ivy Maitland; and for another five minutes we talked gravely of work and life and careers for women. Ivy must have been younger by several years than any other woman in the club; and in that setting she seemed a human note of interrogation, scored by the present on the threshold of the future. She also seemed sadly out of place. Her friends were too old for her, most of them were married, some were living apart from their wives and others were not living far enough apart from the wives of other men.
At the end of five minutes, forgetting her concern for a career, she darted off to dance with John Gaymer; and her place was taken by Sam Dainton, lately returned from Paris and full of gossip about the conference. The unruffled Gaspard conjured one more chair to our ever-lengthening table; and a basket of plover’s eggs for Sam appeared simultaneously with O’Rane’s chicken and my savoury, while heated revellers lolled over chair-backs with coffee and cigarettes. A warning of indigestion assailed me as I changed my place for the fourth time; intellectual dyspepsia had prostrated me from the moment when these five-minute conversational turns began.
“You look a bit out of the picture, old son,” Sam told me candidly.
“I’m a spectator,” I said. “My uncle feels that I should study the great movement of men.” . . .
“Paris is the spot for that,” he chuckled, with his mouth full. “They call it a peace conference, but I should say it was a full-dress parade for the next war.” . . .
He broke off as Sonia danced up with shining eyes to whisper her discovery that one of our neighbours had married a second husband in the premature belief that the first had been killed. By the time she had done, Sam had finished his plover’s eggs and was in the thick of a discussion with my cousin Laurie, which was to enrich them both if they could only find an out-of-work capitalist to launch them. Ivy concluded an audible disagreement with Gaymer, who I thought was more sodden than his wont, and dragged me headlong into a conversation that seemed to begin as startling indecency and cooled to the temperate obscurity of psychoanalysis.