She had made a preposterous little picture of the kind of man who would do: he was an English diplomat of great but not very virile beauty, now abroad, with a house smaller than Brideshead, nearer to London; he was old, thirty-two or -three, and had been recently and tragically widowed; Julia thought she would prefer a man a little subdued by earlier grief. He had a great career before him but had grown listless in his loneliness; she was not sure he was not in danger of falling into the hands of an unscrupulous foreign adventuress; he needed a new infusion of young life to carry him to the Embassy at Paris. While professing a mild agnosticism himself, he had a liking for the shows of religion and was perfectly agreeable to having his children brought up Catholic; he believed, however, in the prudent restriction of his family to two boys and a girl, comfortably spaced over twelve years, and did not demand, as a Catholic husband might, yearly pregnancies. He had twelve thousand a year above his pay, and no near relations. Someone like that would do, Julia thought, and she was in search of him when she met me at the railway station. I was not her man. She told me as much, without a word, when she took the cigarette from my lips.

All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, as one does learn the former – as it seems at the time, the preparatory – life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks of oneself as having been part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.

—

Julia left Sebastian and me at Brideshead and went to stay with an aunt, Lady Rosscommon, in her villa at Cap Ferrat. All the way she pondered her problem. She had given a name to her widower-diplomat; she called him ‘Eustace’, and from that moment he became a figure of fun to her, a little interior, incommunicable joke, so that when at last such a man did cross her path – though he was not a diplomat but a wistful major in the Life Guards – and fall in love with her and offer her just those gifts she had chosen, she sent him away moodier and more wistful than ever; for by that time she had met Rex Mottram.