Aunt Phœbe appeared on the landing above carrying off a rather reluctant Miss Scroby to her room for a real good talk; a crash and an unmistakable giggle proclaimed a minor rag in progress in the common room across the hall in which Sydney Sheldrick was busy. The study door closed on Oswald....
Joan and Huntley passed by outside his window. He sat down in front of his fire, poked it into a magnificent blaze, lit a cigar and sat thinking. The beat of dancing, the melody of the gramophone and a multitude of less distinct sounds soaked in through the door to him.
He was, he reflected, rather like a strange animal among all this youth. They treated him as something remotely old; he was one-and-fifty, and yet this gregarious stir and excitement that brightened their eyes and quickened their blood stirred him too. He couldn’t help a feeling of envy; he had missed so much in his life. And in his younger days the pace had been slower. These young people were actually noisier, they were more reckless, they did more and went further than his generation had gone. In his time, with his sort of people, there had been the virtuous life which was, one had to admit it, slow, and the fast life which was noisily, criminally, consciously and vulgarly vicious. This generation didn’t seem to be vicious, and was anything but slow. How far did they go? He had been noting little things between Peter and this Reinhart girl. What were they up to between them? He didn’t understand. Was she manœuvring to marry the boy? She must be well on the way to thirty, twenty-six or twenty-seven perhaps, she hadn’t a young girl’s look in her eyes. Was she just amusing herself by angling for calf-love? Was she making a fool of Peter? Their code of manners was so easy; she would touch his hands, and once Peter had stroked her bare forearm as it lay upon the table. She had looked up and smiled. Leaving her arm on the table. One could not conceive of Dolly permitting such things. Was this an age of daring innocence, or what was coming to the young people?
Joan seemed more dignified than the others, but she, too, had her quality of prematurity. At her age Dolly had dressed in white with a pink sash. At least, Dolly must have been about Joan’s age when first he had seen her. Eighteen—seventeen? Of course a year or so makes no end of difference just at this age....
From such meditations Oswald was roused by the tumult of a car outside. He took a wary glimpse from his window at this conveyance, and discovered that it was coloured an unusual bright chocolate colour, and had its chauffeur—a depressed-looking individual—in a livery to match. He went out into the hall to discover the large presence, the square face, the “whisker,” and the china-blue eyes of Lady Charlotte Sydenham. He knew she was in England, but he had had no idea she was near enough to descend upon them. She stood in the doorway surveying the Christmas disorder of the hall. Some one had adorned Oswald’s stuffed heads with paper caps, the white rhinoceros was particularly motherly with pink bonnet-strings under its throat, a box of cigarettes had been upset on the table amidst various hats, and half its contents were on the floor, which was also littered with scraps of torn paper from the crackers; from the open door of the library came the raucous orchestration of the gramophone, and the patter and swish of dancers.
“I thought you’d be away,” said Aunt Charlotte, a little checked by the sight of Oswald. “I’m staying at Minchings on my way to sit on the platform at Cambridge. We’re raising money to get those brave Ulstermen guns. Something has to be done if these Liberals are not to do as they like with us. They and their friends the priests. But I knew there’d be a party here. And those aunts. So I came.... Who are all these young people you have about?”
“Miscellaneous friends,” said Oswald.
“You’ve got a touch of grey in your hair,” she noted.
“I must get a big blond wig,” he said.
“You might do worse.”