So Repton stood in the middle of May, 1915, when he became aware that an obscure member (obscure at least in the House of Commons--and Repton noticed little of, and cared nothing for, the merely luxurious world of London), an aristocrat of sorts, one of the _Demaine_,--George Demaine it seemed, was being talked about. He was being pushed somehow. Repton hardly heeded so commonplace a phenomenon, save perhaps to wonder what job was on:--he continued to push Van Diemens. CHAPTER V The Petheringtons’ house, to which Mary Smith drove on the evening of 12th of April, under the two pretty little electric lights of her car, one for either side of her face, was one of a hundred similar London houses, a huge brown cube in the middle of Grosvenor Square. It was no longer called Petherington House; it had once again regained its more familiar appellation of No. 89, under which it had been famous for the complete lack of entertainment of any sort which had distinguished the short session of 1912. Then old Hooker had died, the changes in the Cabinet had come, Hooker’s wife had married the Bishop and also died immediately, and finally the Petheringtons had taken the place, foolishly called it by their own title for a few months, and finding it unknown to cabmen and to their friends’ chauffeurs also under this appellation, they slowly reverted to the old name. If hospitality is a fault when pushed to an extreme, the Petheringtons exhibited that fault. But so excellent were their arrangements--for business will out even in the smallest details of domestic life--that no one suffered in the crush, and that it was perfectly easy in the time a guest ordinarily allowed himself for the function, to go up the stairs and down again, though perhaps too much time was wasted at the necessarily narrow entrance where men must seek their hats and coats. The movement of Society in this particular case was rendered the more facile by the emptiness of the hall, from which everything had been taken except the Great Stuffed Bear which had been shot by the servant of a trapper who had sold it to the correspondent of the furrier of Lady Petherington, and which now stood holding a tray, with an expression of extreme ferocity, and labelled “The Caucasus, 17th June, 1910,”--for in those mountains Mr. Petherington--as he then was--had travelled. Mary Smith was not disappointed. Mooning aimlessly about the crowded rooms above, in an atmosphere surcharged with mauve Moravian music--the loudest of its kind--shuffled the anxious and slightly bowed form of Dolly, the young and popular Prime Minister.