He’d been goaded into it by Prentice. ‘Take it or leave it. Pony’s yours for fifty pounds but be warned – he takes a bit of riding!’ And the clear implication – Too much of a handful for you!‘ He thought if he threw himself on Dolly’s mercy, she might intercede for him – get him off his bargain. Perhaps she could persuade her husband not to take advantage of a young and inexperienced officer? He didn’t like appearing in the role of innocent naughty boy but still less did he like having to borrow yet again.

Then, by God! The pony! In his secret heart he was aware that he couldn’t manage it. The pony was vicious. He had made a mess of Prentice’s syce. Put him on his back for a week, they said. ‘Oh, what the hell!’ he thought. ‘Damnation to you, Major Prentice!’ And he drained his glass.

The regimental doctor sitting opposite watched him guardedly. He always felt out of place in the elegant company of Bateman’s Horse. He tried not to, but could not help contrasting the splendour of their grey and silver mess dress with his own Indian Medical Service dark blue. He was not, in fact, thinking about Dolly Prentice. He was thinking about Prentice. He remembered (would he ever forget?) the public shame that had followed his first greeting at the hands of Major Prentice.

‘Tell me, doctor,’ he had said, ‘- we are all so eager to know – from what barrow in Petticoat Lane did you buy those boots?’

It was true that his boots did not come from a fashionable boot-maker. They had come from a saddler in Maidstone and they had looked good enough when he had first tried them on. He was painfully aware that, by comparison with the officers of Bateman’s Horse, the ‘Bengal Greys’, he lacked the skintight precision supplied by Lobb of St James’s, the skintight precision which forbade anything more substantial inside than a cut-down ladies’ silk stocking.

His thoughts turned to Dolly. Dolly with her large eyes and her ready sympathy.