Joyce didn’t seem to think there was any need for him to come.
“It’s a family affair,” she said, coldly.
A family affair? Oh, yes, he was outside the family. Merely the insignificant husband of a Bellairs. His voice would have no weight in the family councils. He was just a damned outsider, tolerated as an unfortunate mésalliance—Joyce’s mistake. Perhaps Joyce guessed a little at those thoughts of his, as he stood silent, with flushed face, raging inwardly at the humiliation which her words made him feel.
“I didn’t want to drag you into a family row,” she said. “But you’d better come, after all.”
It was in his mind to say that he would be damned if he went, that he had no intention of being patronised by the supercilious Alban, his detestable brother-in-law, or bullied by Lady Ottery, his exalted Mother-in-law. But the sight of Joyce’s tear-stained face restrained him. The news that Holme Ottery was up for sale was a blow at her heart, as he could see by her unusual pallor. He would be a cad to quarrel with her now, and thrust his own personality forward in the family tragedy.
When she went upstairs, he turned over the pages of Country Life. Holme Ottery was not the only house for sale, as well he knew. Page after page was filled with the usual announcements of “Noble Estates,” “Fine Old Country Mansions,” “Historic Residences.” Some of them belonged to people he knew, as he had seen many times before.
He remembered other words spoken by Lord Ottery. “Our day is done,” he’d said. “The War and its costs have finished us.”
These advertisements were only one more proof of the change that was happening in England, where the Old Order was gassing, giving place to—what?
It was no new revelation to him. He’d seen the boards up outside many old houses. Some of his own friends had abandoned their old places and come to live in the Albany, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, the Kensingtons, and other districts not immensely far from Mayfair, but outside its former sanctuary, now delivered over to the New Rich. They were not distressingly poor. They were carrying on rather well! But they’d lost the family roof-trees, the quiet parklands, something of their state in England. Profiteers, American millionaires, Jews, were taking over some of the old houses, though many remained unsold. . . . This news about Holme Ottery for sale brought sharply home to Bertram that silent, social, bloodless revolution which was happening in England. Well, it didn’t matter very much to him. It mattered very much to Joyce.
She was silent going down in the train to Sussex, and seemed to have a chill. He wrapped his overcoat about her in the corner of the first-class carriage where she sat smoking cigarettes through a long amber tube. She wore her country clothes of rough tweed, and looked, he thought, “patrician” to her polished finger-tips. But amazingly young, and child-like, in a white Tam-o’-shanter, with a gleam of gold where her bobbed hair curled above her neck. He would have liked to kiss her neck, so delicate and white, so inviting, as she bent her head over the morning paper. He sat close to her for a while, and put his arm about her waist, which she suffered impatiently, until she asked him to give her elbow room and not to get into one of his “soppy moods.”