Diana would have been enjoying the conversation more if she had been less in charge of it. Without Constance’s irrelevant and irreverent comments, Diana rode between fixed rails, ponderously benign. She could not, as Constance did quite naturally, charm her guests. She had to rely on reassuring them. Though Laura did not look quite so fixed in the headlights as she had when she arrived, her husband and father were more responsible for that than Diana was. Her years of kind impersonality in dealing with generations of women had eroded whatever skill she might have had to inspire affection. First she would have to feel it, as she increasingly did for David. But Diana was more mindful of the pain in her feet than she was of her warm manners as she saw her guests out the door.

Diana wanted to talk about her impression of Laura, in particular, but Constance was sleeping soundly. So Diana was left to her own thoughts as she got ready for bed. Of one thing she was certain. David had spoken to them about her relationship with Constance, and, though that would account for Laura’s extreme nervousness, Diana was relieved that no sudden revelation lay before her. Laura did not seem to her a natural bigot so much as emotionally only half-grown, one of those women so conscious of and responsible for other people’s feelings that she had no time to discover and refine her own. She was aware, at least, that her children were in the process of leaving her behind in her nursery morality where she would be safe but increasingly lonely. So she had been willing, though mainly for her father’s sake, to take the test Diana was for her and leave the grading in Diana’s hands. Laura would be saying to Jack, ‘I’m not sure she liked me,’ and in that uncertainty Laura would be more astute than Jack who was too fond and protective of her to imagine anyone could find his wife less than charming. David had brought his easy, his amenable daughter, but what of the other one, Mary? The blazing beauty of the family in Jack’s judgment, with a temper David had little patience for. And it had been the subject of recent family concern, or Laura would not have blushed. Well, if David wanted to disrupt his family, it was his business. Yet, seeing him with his child, Diana knew that he had spoken the truth about himself as a serious father. Perhaps it was Diana’s business to warn him that, in trying to make a bridge of himself, he could break his own back.