‘Tra-hippit!’ Cedric murmured at her elbow. ‘Honestly, I exult. It might have been so much worse.’

Sir Henry was now making a brief summary of the rest of the field. His son, Claude, he thanked God, turning slightly towards Jenetta, had inherited a sufficient portion from his maternal grandmother, and was therefore able through this and through his own talents to make provision for his wife and (he momentarily eyed Fenella) daughter. His daughter Pauline (Troy heard her make an incoherent noise) had been suitably endowed at the time of her marriage and generously provided for by her late husband. She had her own ideas in the bringing up of her children and was able to carry them out. ‘Which,’ Cedric muttered with relish, ‘is a particularly dirty crack at Paul and Panty, don’t you feel?

‘Ssh!’ said Desdemona on the other side of him.

Sir Henry drifted into a somewhat vague and ambiguous diatribe on the virtues of family unity and the impossibility, however great the temptation, of ever entirely forgetting them. For the last time her attention wandered, and was jerked sharply back by the sound of her own name: ‘Mrs Agatha Troy Alleyn…her dramatic and, if I as the subject may so call it, magnificent canvas, which you are presently to see—’

Troy, greatly startled, learned that the portrait was to be left to the Nation.

‘It’s not the money, Milly. It’s not the money, Dessy,’ wailed Pauline in the drawing-room. ‘I don’t mind about the money, Jen. It’s the cruel, cruel wound to my love. That’s what hurts me, girls. That’s what hurts.’

‘If I were you,’ said Millamant with her laugh, ‘I think I should feel a bit hipped about the money, too.’

Miss Orrincourt, according to her custom, had gone away to do her face. The ladies were divided into two parties—the haves and the have-nots. Dessy, a not altogether delighted legatee, had a foot in each camp. ‘It’s damn mean,’ she said; ‘but after the things I’ve said about the Orrincourt, I suppose I’m lucky to get anything. What do you think of her, Jen?’

‘I suppose,’ said Jenetta Ancred thoughtfully, ‘she is real, isn’t she? I mean, I catch myself wondering, quite seriously, if she could be somebody who has dressed up and is putting on the language and everything as a colossal practical joke. I didn’t think people ever were so shatteringly true to type. But she’s much too lovely, of course, to be a leg-pull.’

‘Lovely!’ cried Desdemona. ‘Jen! Straight out of the third row of the chorus and appallingly common at that.’

‘I dare say, but they are generally rather lovely in the chorus nowadays, aren’t they, Fenella?’

Fenella had withdrawn entirely from the discussion. Now, when they all turned to her, she faced them rigidly, two bright red spots burning over her cheek-bones.