One can at least be hopeful. Even if one is not clever one can be that....
From such thoughts as these it was that this unhappy hostess was roused by a sound of smashing glass, a rumpus, and a pistol shot.
She stood up, she laid her hand on her heart, she said “Oh!” and gripped her dressing-table for support....
After a long time and when it seemed that it was now nothing more than a hubbub of voices, in which her husband’s could be distinguished clearly, she crept out very softly upon the upper landing.
She perceived her cousin, Captain Douglas, looking extremely fair and frail and untrustworthy in a much too gorgeous kimono dressing-gown of embroidered Japanese silk. “I can assure you, my lord,” he was saying in a strange high-pitched deliberate voice, “on—my—word—of—honour—as—a—soldier, that I know absolutely nothing about it.”
“Sure it wasn’t all imagination, my lord?” Sir Peter asked with his inevitable infelicity....
She decided to lean over the balustrading and ask very quietly and clearly:
“Lord Moggeridge, please! is anything the matter?”
§ 6
All human beings are egotists, but there is no egotism to compare with the egotism of the very young.