And this was where Linnet, among other things, came in.

For in that separate, defiant enrichment of hers to which Louis had driven her, Joanna grasped at any emotional activity that offered.

She had known that Linnet had a lot of friends whom he never brought home, though it was with them he spent his spare time and all his holidays. She had known this, but it had not concerned her. Now, as she hardened self-defensively towards Louis, her shoot of tenderness for Linnet was enlarged. For the first time she really listened, encouraging his confidence, and in so doing became in some measure involved. It was clear that her brother and she and Louis all suffered from the same manie de la grandeur. The form only was different with Linnet.

All his friends were newly-rich. The girls were solidly material in their worldliness and inclined to be fast. The young men drank champagne with their luncheon at the “North British,” made a point of being seen about with the musical comedy star of the moment from London, and had always some “gemble” or other on hand at the Stock Exchange. They lived in suburban villas and had other villas at the coast. They kept motors and racing yachts. To Joanna their lives appeared ugly and on the whole vapid; but to her new powers of observation nothing human came amiss. In some curious way too the mere fact of their wealth served her with Louis. Never meeting them, he learned of their doings only through Joanna’s talk and letters, and he was childishly impressed and perturbed by the growing incident of her life apart from himself.

But what interested her to the point of horror was the transformed Linnet she now saw. It was evident that the Howdens, the Rintouls, the Bells and the rest (there were not above six families in this particular set) could not quite accept young Bannerman (“Linty” as they called him) as one of themselves. True, he dressed like them, like them wore his hat well back on his head, and shared in all their pursuits. But he was never able to invite them to his house, and always in his background there was the consciousness of a mother eccentric in ways prohibitive to the Bells, the Rintouls and the Howdens. So it had come that Linnet, himself excruciatingly subject to his disabilities, had taken the only way open to his nature. He had traded on the family eccentricity, and in the circle he desired to enter, had constituted himself as clown. He had only to meet one of his gay friends, Joanna noticed, to be electrified into an almost frightening animation. Her heart ached for him as she watched him wave his arms about, and listened to his outrageous speeches. But what touched her to something deeper than pity was the unconscious isolation and contempt that lay beneath his fooling. He had succeeded in his aim. His friends rewarded his queer physical abandonment with laughter and a special kind of affection that apparently gratified him. He was both popular and privileged. But his sister discerned in him something of the wistful, increative solitude which she had obscurely felt in her popular father. “A queer fish” his friends called him, and it was so he liked to think of himself. But as yet he had no being save in the shoal, and thus, not belonging there, had less being than they.