“So glad you could come, chérie! Your husband too! Merveilleux!”
That last sentence was a dig of spite from the Countess Lydia.
“How d’you do, Lady Joyce?” This very gallantly and formally from General Bellasis, who nodded affably to Joyce’s husband, and said, “Going strong, Pollard?”
Kenneth Murless sauntered in (his arduous duties at the Foreign Office didn’t prevent afternoon outings of this kind) looking elegant, as usual, in morning dress with a white slip beneath his waistcoat, and immaculate spats. Bertram hated him unendurably.
“Well, Joyce! Is Lady Ottery in good form? Not nervous, I hope?”
“Mother is never nervous,” said Joyce. “It’s not a family failing.”
She held a kind of reception, standing there by her seat, and Bertram was aware of some extremely pretty girls, and many ugly old ladies. The old ladies interested him most. God, how ugly they were! Many of them wore black silk with beads. He thought such costumes had departed with Queen Victoria. Others were youthfully dressed in the latest style, with odd little hats and short capes like Joyce’s, and low-necked bodices. They were fat and old and hard and wrinkled. He did not blame them for that—poor old darlings!—but only observed them. He knew some of them by sight. He’d had the honour of shaking hands with some of them—little old hands with many rings—at various receptions to which Joyce had dragged him. There were two Dowager Duchesses, like caricatures of themselves by Bolshevik artists. The Lord alone knew how many Countesses. The old Régime had rallied up.
The men were in a minority, but those present were full of quality—old gentlemen whom one sees in profile deep sunk in club chairs, white-haired, bald, with bags under their eyes, with side-whiskers, with hawk noses; and middle-aged men who, one day, would be the exact replicas of the old gentlemen, but now straight-backed, with close-cut hair, firm mouths, alert eyes.
Bertram recognised Lord Banthorp, Viscount Risborough, the Duke of Berkshire, old Brookwood of Banstead, Morton of Greystoke, and the new Earl of Winthorp. He also observed the entry of several Major-Generals and Brigadiers in “civvies,” as Bill Huggett called his old pre-war clothes, and not so terrifying as when his machine-gun company had been reviewed by them before and after battle.
His mother-in-law had certainly drawn “a good house.” It represented the aristocracy of England in its oldest and crustiest tradition, with only a thin sprinkling, he guessed, of the newer vintages. The old, ugly ladies had come out of their hiding-places in Mayfair to support England in “the hour of danger.” There was something fine about them, in spite of ugliness, even because of it. He admitted that. He knew their spirit, indomitable, hard to themselves as to others, resolute in what they believed to be their duty. They were the grandmothers of modern girlhood in Joyce’s crowd, those pretty, laughing, dashing-looking girls, and on the whole, perhaps, of stronger stuff. Well, perhaps not! Joyce and her crowd had come out well in the war, with some scandalous exceptions. His eyes wandered about, studying the faces in the hall with something like a new vision—Christy’s angle of vision, Janet Welford’s.