"How do you know?"

"I heard you."

"You may have heard some one; you didn't know it was me. I went once and mother went once. You couldn't tell which was which."

The Seraph lit a cigarette and walked with her to the door of the supper-room.

"Oh, it was your mother?" he said. "Then she went the first time."

"But how do you know?" Sylvia repeated.

"I can't explain, any more than about the car coming back this morning."

Sylvia shook her head a little uneasily.

"You're abnormal," she pronounced.

"Because I...?"

"Go on."

"Because I know a fraction more about you than other people?"

"Do you?"

"Only a fraction. It would take time to understand you."

"How much? I hate to be thought a sphinx."

"However little I wanted, we should be parted before I got it."

"Why? How? How parted?"

The Seraph shrugged his shoulders.

"Don't ask me to read the future," he said with a sigh.

At the end of the ball I found the Roden boys congratulating themselves on the success of the evening. I added my quota of praise, and was pressed to state if I now felt equal to three successive nights at Commemoration.

"Which reminds me!" Robin exclaimed, flying off at his usual tangent.

"Where's Sylvia? Sylvia, my angel, what about Commem.?"

His sister looked tired but happy, and in some way excited.

"I'll come if you want me," she answered, putting her arm round Robin's neck and kissing him good-night. "Yes, all right--I will. Oh, Mr. Rawnsley told me this morning that Mavis wouldn't be able to come, so you must get another girl."

Robin dropped his voice confidentially.

"See if you can persuade Cynthia to come. And we're still a man short."

Sylvia looked slowly round the room with thoughtful, unsmiling eyes--past Culling, past Gartside....

"Will you come, Seraph?" she asked.

Less than a day and a half had passed since I had noticed her practice of avoiding Christian names. For some reason I had supposed nicknames to fall into the same category.

CHAPTER V

COMMEMORATION

"Oxford ... the seat of one of the most ancient and celebrated universities in Europe, is situated amid picturesque environs at the confluence of the Cherwell and the Thames.... Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor.... The best time for a visit is the end of the Summer term.... This period of mingled work and play (the latter predominating) is named _Commemoration_.... It is almost needless to add that an introduction to a 'Don' will greatly add to the visitor's pleasure and profit."

KARL BAEDECKER: "Handbook for Travellers: Great Britain."

Of the weeks that passed between my return to London from Brandon Court and our departure from London to Oxford, I have only the most indistinct recollection. My engagement book earned many honourable scars before I carried it away into my present exile, but for May and the first half of June there appears a black, undecipherable smudge that my memory tells me should represent a long succession of late nights and crowded days. Individual items are blurred out of recognition; my general sense of the period is that I pretended to be preternaturally young, and was punished by being made to feel prematurely old.

It was the busiest part of the London season, and Gladys appeared to receive cards for an average of three balls a night on five nights of the week. I accompanied her everywhere, growing gradually broken to the work and relieved of my more serious responsibilities by the fact that Philip Roden was too busy at the House to waste his nights in a ball-room. We seemed to move in the midst of a stage army, the same few hundred men, women, and dowagers reappearing in an endless march-past. With the advent of the big hotels, hospitality had changed in character since the days when I counted myself a Londoner: there was more of it and it was less hospitable. The rising generation, and more particularly the female portion of it, seemed to have taken matters into its own hands.

Regularly each morning, after a late breakfast, Gladys would set me to write a series of common-form letters: "Dear Mr. Blank," I would say, "My niece and I shall be so pleased if you will dine with us here to-night at 8.30 and go on to Lady Anonym's ball." Then Gladys would bring unknowing guest and unknown hostess into communication. "Can I speak to Lady Anonym?" I would hear her call down the telephone. "Oh, good morning! I say, do you think you could _possibly_ do with another man for your ball to-night? Honest? It _is_ sweet of you. Oh, quite a nice thing--Mr. Incognito Blank, 101, Utopia Chambers, St. James.

Thanks, most awfully. Oh no, not _him_, he's the most awful stiff; this is a dear thing. Well, I would have, only he's only just got back to England, he's been shooting big game...."

This was the retail method. In the case of intimate friends, Gladys would be encouraged to send in her own list of desirable invitees.

Because I am old-fashioned and unacquainted with English ways, I trust I am not inaccessible to new ideas. I would carry the policy of promiscuity to its logical conclusion. An announcement in the _Times_ with draft _menu_, name of band and programme of music--even a placard outside Claridge's--would save endless postage and stationery, and could not pack the ball-room tighter than on a dozen occasions I remember. Hostesses who believe that numbers are the soul of hospitality, could be certain beforehand of the success of their efforts; superior young men would continue to remark, "Society gettin'

very mixed, what?" exactly as they have done ever since I entered my first ball-room at the age of seventeen. Everybody, in short, would be pleased.

We saw a good deal of Sylvia during those weeks, as for reasons of her own she would frequently drop in at Pont Street and conduct her share of the arrangements over our telephone. Occasionally Gladys would be called in as an accomplice, I would hear "Mr. Aintree's" name added to Lady Anonym's list, and Gladys would remark with fine carelessness, "Oh, just send him the card, if you will; don't bother to say who it comes from." The Seraph may have suspected, but he never had documentary proof of the originating cause of some of his invitations.

In making our arrangements for Commemoration, I decided to take the greater part of my charges to Oxford by road. Robin, of course, was still in residence, and Philip promised to come down by the first possible train. Gladys, Sylvia, the Seraph, and a _pis-aller_ of Robin's named Cynthia Bargrave constituted my flock; we motored quietly down to Henley, where we lunched and chartered a houseboat for the Regatta, and arrived in Oxford with ample time for the three girls to have a comfortable rest before dinner. I made rather a point of this, as they were going to have three very tiring days and would naturally wish to look their best; moreover, I wanted to roam round the town with the Seraph.

Even Oxford, that I thought could never alter, had changed during my years of absence. The little, nameless back-street colleges I would gladly sacrifice to the Destroyer, for they serve no purpose beyond that of breeding proctors, and I know we counted it an indignity to be fined by the scion of a college we had to reach by cab. But the High should have been inviolate; there wanted no new colleges breaking through its immemorial sides.... Univ. men, standing at their lodge gate and looking northward, have told me the High already contains one college in excess.

While the Seraph sought out Robin's rooms in Canterbury, I wandered through the college--guiltily, I admit--looking for traces of a popular outbreak that occurred when a ball took place at Blenheim and House men asked in vain for leave to attend it. In time I came to my own old rooms in Tom, and gazed rather in sorrow than anger at the strange new name painted over the door. Twice my fingers went to the handle, twice I told myself that "Mr. R.F. Davenant" had as much right to privacy as I should have claimed in his place.... I wandered out through Tom Gate, across St. Aldates, and down Brewer Street to those pleasant digs in Micklem Hall, where I once spent an all-too-short twelve months. Then I returned to college, crept furtively back to the old familiar door, knocked, listened, entered....

"R.F. Davenant" was far more civil than I should have been at a like intrusion. He showed me round the rooms, offered me whisky and cigarettes, wanted to know when I had been up, whether I was going to the Gaudy.... We were friends in a minute. I liked his fair, neatly-parted hair and clean, fresh colouring; I liked his Meissonier artist proofs; I liked the way the left back leg of the sofa collapsed unless you underpinned it with a Liddle and Scott. Not a thing was changed but the photographs on the mantelpiece. I walked over and surveyed them critically. Then one of those things happened that convince me an idle Quixotic Providence is watching over my least movements: I was staring at the picture of a girl on horseback when he volunteered the information that it was his sister.

"Your married sister?" I suggested.

"Do you know her?"

He fed me on Common-room tea and quarter-pound wedges of walnut cake.

Joyce was coming up for two of the three balls I was attending, coming unprovided with partners to chaperone some girl who had captured her brother's wandering fancy. These elder sisters earn more crowns than they are ever accorded; it seemed that Joyce who trampled on the world would stretch herself out to be trampled on by her heedless only brother. I wonder wherein the secret lies.

"Come and dine," suggested Dick Davenant.