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end, in twenty-five years’ time, with the place being turned into an Officers’ Convalescent Home.
    Beatrice’s brother, Jocelyn, is five years older than she.
    Large and handsome with very pale blue eyes. One’s first impression is of a man likely to be master of any situation. But this impression is quickly succeeded by another. Very little seems to impinge upon him. He has acquired a certain manner of reacting but behind this is an extensive passivity. One wonders why one’s first impression was so wrong. And then suddenly something occurs to him, his eyes sparkle and with the conviction of his whole large body he says: And that was a damned fine thing to have done! The authority of his judgement (even to a boy who knows no history) appears to be based on all that has been worth preserving from the past. And then—as if relapsing into that past itself—he becomes profoundly and secretly passive again. What is it that makes him so elusive?
    To understand him closely we must consider him from afar. Towards the end of the last century the English upper class faced an unusual crisis. Their power was in no way threatened: but their own chosen image of themselves was threatened. They had long since accommodated themselves to industrial capitalism and trade, but they had chosen to continue the way of life of an hereditary, landed élite. This way of life, with its underlying assumptions, was becoming more and more incompatible with the modern world. Onone hand the scale of modern finance, industry and imperialist investment required a new image of leadership; and on the other hand the masses were demanding democracy. The solution which the upper class found was true to their own character: it was both spirited and frivolous. If their way of life had to disappear, they would first apotheosize it by openly and shamelessly transforming it into a spectacle: if it was no longer viable, they would turn it into theatre. They no longer claimed (except purely verbally) justification by reference to a natural order: instead they performed a play upon a stage with its own laws and conventions. From the 1880s onwards this was the underlying meaning of Social Life—the Hunts, the Shoots, the Race Meetings, the Court Balls, the Regattas, the Great House Parties.
    The general public welcomed the apotheosis. Like most audiences they felt that, to some degree, they owned the performing players. Their one-time rulers appeared to have become their romancers. Meanwhile during the diversion the upper class—at its class centre—habituated itself to its new and necessarily more disguised exercise of power. Like a phoenix it was to rise again from its own ashes, for the ashes were only those of its regalia, finally used as theatrical costume.
    Jocelyn is an impoverished and peripheral member of this class. The Hunts and the Point-to-Point Races he goes to are comparatively undistinguished ones. But this increases his need to believe that the play is life and that the rest of life is a suspended empty interval. This is why he is elusive and why, when he is off-stage with no lines to speak or actions to perform, he becomes unusually passive. But let us be clear: it is not because he wants limelight or applause (on the contrary, he would consider them vulgarities), but because he believes that the play is reality.
    His costume for the part: top boots with mahogany-coloured tops, spurs, cord breeches, a faded swallow-tailed pink coat, a white stock, a low-crowned top hat, a short leather crop with a long lash.
    From November to April he hunts four days a week.
    I must emphasize that I have used the word ‘play’ as a metaphor so that we can appreciate the essentially artificial, symbolic, exemplaryand spectacular nature of the occasion. But the scene and the props are real. The winter weather, the hounds, the coverts to be drawn, the fences to be jumped, the country that is there to be ridden over, the drag of the fox, the fatigue of the man