And, with that, he lowered his voice conspiratorially and invited me to join a concession-hunting syndicate which the alert Sir Adolf Erckmann was forming. The proposal surprised me, inasmuch as a sense of personal unworthiness, stronger even than my impatience of Dainton’s politics, had frightened me away from Rutland Gate since Lady Dainton chose it for her second blooming. Whenever I failed in an excuse to dine elsewhere, I seemed to pick my way through the melancholy ruins of fallen European dynasties. Starting with refugee Russian princes, the Daintons extended the net of hospitality to catch expropriated Poles and were only waiting for a change in public sentiment before opening their doors to the crownless heads of Germany. All were welcomed with the ceremony which England accords to the runaway scions of a kingly house: Sir Roger received his guests in the hall with a braver display of decorations than etiquette warranted; Lady Dainton curtseyed till I felt giddy; and, if the throne of the Czars remained empty, that was only because Moscow was so far from London. I had heard so much of the coming royalist counterrevolution that I fully expected to find Dainton smuggling arms into Russia. “Your foreign information is better than most,” he began darkly; and then the plans of the syndicate were laid before me. Listening with half of one ear, I seemed—with the other—to catch the thick tones of Sir Philip Saltash as he discoursed of the waters which he troubled and of the adventurous anglers who fished therein. My sleek tempter, I confess, appeared to me at this moment rather in the guise of a vulture; and, when I thought of the get-rich-quickly schemes that were discussed daily in my hearing, the heavens seemed to darken with these birds of prey. Sam, with his options on empty houses; Laurie, with his plans for holding the devastated areas to ransom; Dainton, with his gambling in marks and francs: all looked on Europe primarily as a place to loot. Yet two of these three had offered even their lives so few years before; and the third had given away his cars and sold his securities to fit out Red Cross ambulances! “Are you shaking the bloody hand of the soviet?,” I enquired, with shocked memories of Dainton’s attacks on ‘bolshevism’. “The soviet? Good heavens, why . . .?” he gasped with much the same perplexity as his wife had exhibited when I asked if ministers of religion should be regarded as paid agitators. Dainton would have nothing to do with the soviet. Lenin and his gang would, with the help of God, be brought to book by Admiral Kolchak; but, without waiting for that consummation, he was ready to help the commercial recovery of Russia by pouring in goods, machinery and the material of a new transport-system. As he could not hope to receive commodities in exchange, he would be content with gold. “Then you’re recognizing the revolution?,” I asked, as we moved upstairs.