“Where are your people going to stay?” asked Val, elaborately casual.
“‘Rainbow.’ What do you think of the war?”
“Rotten, so far. The Boers aren’t sports a bit. Why don’t they come out into the open?”
“Why should they? They’ve got everything against them except their way of fighting. I rather admire them.”
“They can ride and shoot,” admitted Val, “but they’re a lousy lot. Do you know Crum?”
“Of Merton? Only by sight. He’s in that fast set too, isn’t he? Rather La-di-da and Brummagem.”
Val said fixedly: “He’s a friend of mine.”
“Oh! Sorry!” And they sat awkwardly staring past each other, having pitched on their pet points of snobbery. For Jolly was forming himself unconsciously on a set whose motto was:
“We defy you to bore us. Life isn’t half long enough, and we’re going to talk faster and more crisply, do more and know more, and dwell less on any subject than you can possibly imagine. We are ‘the best’—made of wire and whipcord.” And Val was unconsciously forming himself on a set whose motto was: “We defy you to interest or excite us. We have had every sensation, or if we haven’t, we pretend we have. We are so exhausted with living that no hours are too small for us. We will lose our shirts with equanimity. We have flown fast and are past everything. All is cigarette smoke. Bismillah!” Competitive spirit, bone-deep in the English, was obliging those two young Forsytes to have ideals; and at the close of a century ideals are mixed. The aristocracy had already in the main adopted the “jumping-Jesus” principle; though here and there one like Crum—who was an “honourable”—stood starkly languid for that gambler’s Nirvana which had been the summum bonum of the old “dandies” and of “the mashers” in the eighties. And round Crum were still gathered a forlorn hope of blue-bloods with a plutocratic following.
But there was between the cousins another far less obvious antipathy—coming from the unseizable family resemblance, which each perhaps resented; or from some half-consciousness of that old feud persisting still between their branches of the clan, formed within them by odd words or half-hints dropped by their elders. And Jolly, tinkling his teaspoon, was musing: “His tie-pin and his waistcoat and his drawl and his betting—good Lord!”