“Then you don’t know David,” she rejoined with a touch of petulance. “He’s working himself to death; but, if any one tries to pay him for what he does, he thinks it’s charity. Let’s talk of something else. You’ve not met this Maitland child? She’s very pretty and very silly, I should think. Just what I was at her age . . . or at my own, I suppose you’d say if I gave you a chance. Finished? Then let’s go up,” she continued with the restlessness that characterized the age or at least the women of it whom I met that night. One and all, they sat down and jumped up again like marionettes that would collapse if their wires slackened; they looked at one page of a paper and then tossed it away; they clamoured for cigarettes and laid them aside. Finding that her other guests were not yet arrived, Sonia hurried into the dining-room, snatched a youth unknown to me from his protesting party and danced with him till a voice, peevish with hunger, cried: “Bertie, you little beast, come back and order dinner.” She then attached herself precariously to another party, stole some one else’s portion of caviare and rejoined us in the hall with her booty. O’Rane, I thought, was looking ill and overworked. “Stornaway’s gone down with pneumonia,” he explained; “so I’ve had all his work to do. It’s a bigger thing than I contemplated. I wonder . . . I wonder very much . . .” “Whether you can carry out the schemes we discussed at Cannes?,” I asked. “No! Whether we’ve any place in our present civilization for these colossal fortunes . . . Ah, that’s Ivy’s voice. Come and be introduced.” 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.”