Bertram endeavoured to play up to her remarks, but his glance kept wandering back to Joyce.
She wore an evening frock of white silk, as simple as a child’s, with a necklace of pearls, and in this old dining-room, with its panelled walls and timbered roof and high-backed chairs, looked in her rightful place. She belonged to the house. The house belonged to her, not in timber and stone, but in spiritual heritage. She was Joyce Bellairs of Holme Ottery. The son of an Irish lawyer had no right to her. She belonged to a different stock. She’d been bred by centuries of “selection.” Bertram was but a clodhopper to this child of Caste. So he thought, gloomily.
Kenneth Murless was more of her kind. He too belonged to a Family—the Murlesses of Warwick, with a genealogical tree intertwined with branches of the Bellairs, Charringtons, D’Abernons, Courthopes, Grevilles—all the proud old stock. He kept Joyce amused at this dinner table, as he always amused her, with absurd fantasies, word-play, anecdotes, satirical verse, social caricatures, all charmingly told, lightly, with ease, in a way unaffectedly, though he had conceit.
Bertram observed him closely. Never by a single word had Murless been uncivil, in the slightest degree discourteous, in his relations with Bertram, though he must have been aware of jealousy. Once or twice he went out of his way at this dinner to smile at Bertram, though he was too far down the long table to bring him into his conversation. Once he raised his wine glass in friendly salute. Bertram answered it, with a sudden sense of compunction for his habitual sulkiness with Kenneth Murless. He was a gentleman, and more genial than Alban Bellairs.
Lady Ottery rose from her high-backed chair, with her usual dignity. Dinner, even at home, was to her something of a ritual.
“Don’t talk too long, Ottery,” she said to her husband. “Some of us would like a game of bridge.”
Lord Ottery hated to be hurried over dinner, and said so. Besides, Bellasis was talking about his plans.
“I want to hear them,” said Joyce. “I’ll join you later, Mother.”
She lit a cigarette, and sat on the arm of one of the oak chairs, and took a sip out of Kenneth’s wine glass.
General Bellasis shifted his chair round, so that he faced the little group left at table—Lord Ottery, Alban, Kenneth, Bertram, and Joyce. He had told them most of what the Government had in mind. There was no doubt the Strike was a threat to the whole authority of Parliament, to the social order of England. The men’s leaders were fairly sound, he thought, moderate in their ideas, on the whole. But behind them was a real revolutionary agitation. Underneath, undoubtedly, a lot of dirty work was going on by paid agents with foreign gold. Bolshevists, pure and simple.