So, when the unmentionable took place, Jane was badly left.  The Foreign Office Library Department people, many of them Jane’s contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge, were hurried across the Channel into Life, for which they had been prepared by a course of lectures on the Dangers of Paris.  There also went the confidential secretaries, the clerks and shorthand typists, in their hundreds; degreeless, brainless beings, but wise in their generation.

‘I wish I was a shorthand typist,’ Jane grumbled, brooding with Katherine over their fire.

‘Paris,’ Katherine turned over the delightful word consideringly, finding it wanting.  ’The last place in the world I should choose to be in just now.  Fuss and foolishness.  Greed and grabbing.  The centre of the lunacies and crimes of the next six months.  Politicians assembled together....  It’s infinitely common to go there.  All the vulgarest people....  You’d be more select at Southend or Blackpool.’

‘History is being made there,’ said Jane, quoting from her father’s press.

’Thank you; I’d rather go to Birmingham and make something clean and useful, like glass.’

But Jane wanted to make history in Paris.  She felt out of it, left, as she had felt when other people went to the war and she stayed at home.

On a yellow, foggy day just before Christmas, Lord Pinkerton, with whom Jane was lunching at his club (Lord Pinkerton was quite good to lunch with; you got a splendid feed for nothing), said, ’I shall be going over to Paris next month, Babs.’ (That was what he called her).  ’D’you want to come?’

‘Well, I should say so.  Don’t rub it in, dad.’

Lord Pinkerton looked at her, with his whimsical, affectionate paternity.

’You can come if you like, Babs.  I want another secretary.  Must have one.  If you’ll do some of the shorthand typing and filing, you can come along.  How about it?’

Jane thought for exactly thirty seconds, weighing the shorthand typing against Paris and the Majestic and Life.  Life had it, as usual.

‘Right-o, daddy.  I’ll come along.  When do we go over?’

That afternoon Jane gave notice to her department, and in the middle of January Lord Pinkerton and his bodyguard of secretaries and assistants went to Paris.

4

That was Life.  Trousseaux, concerts, jazzing, dinners, marble bathrooms, notorious persons as thick as thieves in corridors and on the stairs, dangers of Paris surging outside, disappointed journalists besieging proud politicians in vain, the Council of Four sitting in perfect harmony behind thick curtains, Signor Orlando refusing to play, but finding they went on playing without him and coming back, Jugo-Slavs walking about under the aegis of Mr. Wickham Steed, smiling sweetly and triumphantly at the Italians, going to the theatre and coming out because the jokes seemed to them dubious, Sir George Riddell and Mr. G.H.  Mair desperately controlling the press, Lord Pinkerton flying to and fro, across the Channel and back again, while his bodyguard remained in Paris.  There also flew to and fro Oliver Hobart, the editor of the Daily Haste.  He would drop in on Jane, sitting in her father’s outer office, card-indexing, opening and entering letters, and what not.