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all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalised outside the family circle. The Tollands, from what Lovell reported of them, sounded no exception to this prejudiced judgment.
    ‘Of course it was hard for them losing their mother—being left orphans, in fact,’ said Tolland. ‘Though of course Katherine has always done her best—been splendid, really.’
    By introducing the name of the second Lady Warminster into the conversation, he may have hoped to carry the war into the enemy’s country. By then his face was more flushed than ever. His hostess was determined to let him off nothing. I had the impression that she was teasing him, not precisely for my especial benefit, but, at the same time, that my presence as a newcomer to the house afforded a particularly favourable opportunity for the application of torments of this sort. I found later that she was indeed what is called ‘a tease’, perhaps the only outward indication that her inner life was not altogether happy; since there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing. Later, too, I understood how much that night Alfred Tolland must have been torn between a pride that made him hesitate to discuss his relations in front of a stranger, and a taste for talking about his family, too rarely satisfied in his lonely life. It was a treat to visit someone who understood the niceties of family gossip, even if Molly Jeavons required her pound of flesh by ragging him. His face, completely masculine in cast, had at the same time that air of being quite untouched by sexual passion: a look noticeable sometimes among men of his generation. Lovell explained to me later that Tolland had always had a taste for good works and had been much used by the late Lord Sleaford in connexion with his charities. He was a fine example of my friend Barnby’s observation that ‘melancholy is the curse of the upper classes’.
    ‘And what about Norah?’ said Molly Jeavons.
    She had to repeat the question twice, for the first time Tolland made no attempt to reply. He seemed completely knocked out. The challenge was apparently unanswerable. He could only nod his head. There was no spirit left in him. To bridge the silence, I asked if it were not true that Norah Tolland shared a flat with Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.
    ‘She does, she does,’ cried Molly Jeavons, laughing loudly again at my question, as if I had shown myself to have missed the whole point of what was being said. ‘Do you know them? I didn’t think they ever saw any young men. I’m jolly glad to hear they do. Tell me about them. Is it true that Eleanor has been seen in a green pork-pie hat and a bow tie?’
    Mrs. Conyers, escaped from the man to whom French must be talked, now joining our group, nodded her head and pursed her lips, as if to emphasise the depths to which Eleanor had fallen.
    ‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen Eleanor for years,’ I said. ‘I used to dine with them once in a way. I saw Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson at the Isbister Retrospective Exhibition when it was on, and he said something about Norah Tolland. I’ve never met her.’
    ‘They look like a couple of stable-boys,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘And talk like stable-boys, too. I hear they swear like troopers.’
    From the way she spoke, I suspected she knew very little about these two young women, and was, in fact, anxious to learn more. Finding me unable to offer a closely observed report on their activities, she abandoned the subject and renewed her general attack on Tolland.
    ‘And then Hugo,’ she said. ‘What about Hugo?’
    She spoke as if Hugo clinched every other argument. If the name of Norah had knocked Tolland out, that of Hugo reduced him to the position of an army not only defeated in