Yet he wilfully ignored the implication. All day in the stuffy accountant’s office in Leadenhall Street he kept pausing in his work and treating himself to the riotous luxury of the thought: “I don’t believe it was curiosity. Why should she have asked about that letter? And besides, Helen sticks to it she was in love with me in those days! After all, it’s extremely unlikely it was only curiosity.... Of course, she had to say it was. She couldn’t easily have said anything else. At least ...”
So that the position was really complicated instead of being cleared up. And Catherine’s lie was perhaps excusable. That people should fall in love with her was natural enough, but that she should display a similar weakness was extremely undignified, to say the least. And besides, she was not even sure she had been in love with George Trant. Was not there in her an instinct which had said (in effect, if not in so many words): “This is mere sentimental flapdoodle. Wallow as much as you like in its painful ecstasy, but don’t imagine for a moment that it’s the real stuff ...?”
§ 5
George Trant was a member of the Upton Arts Club.
In the room over Burlington’s Music Emporium the Upton Arts Club met on Sunday evenings at 8.30.
One Sunday during the discussion following a paper on “Cézanne and the Modernists,” George drawled sleepily from his arm-chair by the fire:
“Of course, as a staunch Conservative in politics, I——” A startled hush fell upon the assembly. “Disraelian, I need hardly say,” he added, and the amazement was more profound....
§ 6
George Trant was also a member of the Upton Rising Conservative and Unionist Association.
The Upton Rising Conservative and Unionist Association existed from 8 a.m. till 12 midnight every day for the purpose of playing billiards, drinking whisky, and reading sporting newspapers. Occasionally its members would talk politics. It was on one of these comparatively rare occasions (the topic was Mr. Lloyd George’s Land Tax) that George announced quietly from behind his evening paper: