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than a reasonable allowance if he got married, but would pay him well if he went back into the business. But however well that was, he could not see it keeping Anne or Sophie in the luxury they were used to. He was not even sure he would go back into the automobile industry. He had turned his back on it to be as irresponsible as his aristocratic friends for a year, and the longer he was away from it the less it appealed to him as a career. If he did go back he would set his creative sights on the development of noiseless engines and on the social desirability of turning the motor car into a vehicle with as much grace and elegance as a carriage. I’m so damned old-fashioned, he thought, that I’m almost an anachronism. Or a freak.
    ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Anne, spinning with him, her eyes full of the joys of waltzing.
    ‘Horses and carts.’
    ‘You are funny. Horses and carts indeed. You mean a carriage and pair, that’s the gracious phrase.’
    The chandeliers of bright, glittering light revolved, the swirling dresses foamed with colour and Sophie went spinning by in the arms of Ludwig. A little later, when they had all recovered their breath, James said to her, ‘Sophie, will youengage again? Will you join the hoi polloi with me?’
    ‘Join it?’ Sophie’s smile was sparkling. ‘James, I
am
the hoi polloi, don’t you know that?’
    He found her an elegance of poetic motion, her dark shining hair regally dressed, her gown shimmeringly clasping her slender body.
    ‘James, you’re very accomplished.’
    ‘I manage to keep up? Good,’ said James.
    ‘Quite truthfully, you know,’ said Sophie, ‘I haven’t been to this dance hall since I was a girl.’
    ‘That must have been quite three months ago,’ said James.
    ‘Ah,’ she said, head back, eyes brilliant, ‘you’re much more gallant than when you nearly ran us down in your two-wheeler. What a beast you were then. Your language was dreadful.’
    ‘So was your driving, you came round that blind bend like a racing chariot—’
    ‘That was Ludwig. I was an innocent passenger.’
    ‘You were nearly an innocent victim,’ said James. She was laughing at him, it was in her eyes, her smile. ‘What an air you have, Sophie.’
    ‘What kind of an air?’
    ‘Oh, full of the dash of the hoi polloi.’
    Sophie laughed. It was true she had not been to the Dianabad for two or three years, and she was surprising herself in her enjoyment of it tonight. She observed James with interest. Ludwig always looked clean-cut and freshly shaved. James had a thinner face and a slight hint of blue shadow.Ludwig was an entirely likeable young man. James was definitely a trifle devilish, with little glints in his eyes. A tiny suspicion darted into her mind, a suspicion that she might be more susceptible than she thought. She was perfectly happy with life, perfectly content to wait for an intellectual and sophisticated suitor to arrive on her doorstep, and she did not think James quite fell into this category. He was very adult, of course, and slightly whimsical, but the picture she carried in her mind of a prospective husband, while not sharply clear, was based on a learned, professorial figure, a university lecturer, perhaps, a man of dry, academic wit. She looked at James again as they came off the floor. He had rather a good profile but was as darkly visaged as a Corsican freebooter. She had thought him a brigand when she first saw him.
    ‘James,’ she said lightly as he escorted her through the retiring dancers, ‘do you have any scoundrelly ancestors?’
    ‘On my father’s side I think we had some clansmen hanged,’ said James, ‘and on my mother’s side we had two or three Regency highwaymen who just escaped the gallows.’
    ‘I expect you’ve inherited a sense of adventure, then,’ said Sophie. ‘I am not so fortunate. My family on both sides has been terribly dull and respectable.’
    ‘You’ll get over it,’ said James.
    They danced the