Now they were coming to exploit my influence in finding work for Gervaise; and I, knowing the slender proportions of that influence and recollecting the claims already advanced by Sam Dainton and my cousin Laurence, wondered helplessly whether the government did wisely in releasing men from the army before they had found civil employment. For a week before leaving London my telephone had been agitated by the voices of anxious friends who assured me that they could be demobilized at once if I would invent some urgent private business for them. “Good pay, light work and decent holidays,” they all said. I suppose the army let them go because the army could not retain them. At Wilminster and Yareham the troops demobilized themselves and walked home; at Enstaple and Durncliffe they threatened to mutiny if they were ordered back to France. It was one thing, however, to kick a uniform into a cupboard; and something quite different to find civilian clothes that would fit. Gervaise, I decided, must wait until I had discussed with O’Rane my own plans. It might be that, within a few months, I should want all the men I could get; or it might be that I should be cultivating my garden in Ireland. I must wait, too, until I had heard O’Rane’s proposals. Eighteen months had passed since I hunted him out to America, nominally to lecture on the war and really to make a fresh start with Sonia after her disaster with Vincent Grayle. In that time I had purposely not enquired how they were getting on, as a fresh start might well be the fresh start only to more trouble. The woman who jilts two men, marries a third, runs away with a fourth and returns with his child, all before the age of thirty-three, has either too much emotion in her nature or else too little. I must confess to a feeling of embarrassment as the train drew in. The feeling passed as Sonia waved ecstatically from her window and announced breathlessly that no one would believe what a success she had had in Paris, that she was insolvent, that this no longer mattered, that she had the most wonderful news for me, that she was going to have an unprecedented success in London, that it was heavenly to see me again and that she was really going to enjoy herself in Cannes. A woman who lived only for the moment was not likely to be disturbed by regrets or fears; and, as Sonia swung down from the train into my arms, her eyes were as limpid and innocent, her lips were as moistly red and provocative, as when I took her to supper at her first parties fifteen years before. Then and now, she was of those who make the world take them at their own valuation. Then she had babbled of her earliest ball-room triumphs; now she described the men who had thrown themselves at her feet from San Francisco to Paris. “Then you enjoyed yourself?,” I asked, when she paused for breath.