“Recognizing . . .?,” he echoed testily. “This is a business deal; politics don’t enter into it. And I shall be obliged if you’ll keep it absolutely to yourself.” I promised readily enough for the sake of sparing him the embarrassment of explaining how he could accept confiscated Russian gold by day and monopolize the despoiled Russian nobility at night. I did not feel, however, that Europe had yet been made safe for the amateur financier. After their last international flutter the Daintons had let their house in Hampshire; and I imagined that they, like many others, were trying belatedly to economize, though Lady Dainton gave another reason that night for their retirement. “I honestly find no pleasure,” she told me, “in the life people are leading in London. Perhaps I’m old-fashioned. The people themselves, don’t you know? . . . I’m not criticizing _this_ party, of course; but the tone . . . A gigantic beanfeast.” If she had criticized the party in words, as she was criticizing it with her eyes, I should have been constrained to side with her. Old-fashioned or no, I was bred in an age of strict formality, when Loring House still bore its hatchment. When I first stayed at House of Steynes, old Lord Loring hunted us into smoking-suits at eleven o’clock and assembled us furtively in the billiard-room, where he plied us with “weeds”, negus and comments on current yearling-sales. My first London dinner-parties had the ceremony and pomp of a _levée_. In 1920 we had no time for the ceremony, no money for the pomp. “I suppose a beanfeast is all that people can afford,” I said, as I contrasted this revel with the gaieties of a vanished generation. The opera and the ballet were trying valiantly at this time to make us feel that we were back in 1914; but there was no public for both. The Crawleighs and perhaps a dozen others gave their balls and receptions according to the old tradition; but people who wanted to dance found the Turf and Stage less troublesome and more amusing. Those who wished to see their friends could collect them by telephone at the end of dinner and return from the theatre to see their houses converted out of recognition. “Twenty people can find money to entertain,” said Lady Dainton severely, “for one who can find time to be hospitable.”