Kitty Goose on the lawn at Mrs de Vere’s was thankful for Eddie’s presence, for all the more familiar faces, against the intrusion that had taken place. She resented this. His look. Desperately she noticed by a distant elm the spread table and the lemonade. From India, he said, on leave, or more than leave; the Army, you could take it from him, was a pretty rotten show. She resented his idiom, to which she was unused. But more than this, the face, that made her hands tremble on a bow, pulling an arrow that fell too short, twanging an unaccomplished bow. Oh dear, wailed Mrs de Vere, this makes me feel like St Sebastian. In a strawberry hat, like a strawberry ice. Oh dear, it made you laugh in drawing a bow. It made. Then she noticed his teeth. They were very white, even, above the little cushion of his under lip, and this was full and red. In India you clapped your hands, said someone, and the lemonade came running. And you, Miss Goose, he asked. On his hands the veins were swollen from exertion. He was brown. He had the thick, black, curling hair that just avoided being too thick, too black. Altogether it upset her. And the cleft chin.

Altogether Willy Standish was an instance of how nature and breeding can avoid the fashion plate. He was at his best on lawns with a pair of spaniels. Or in a boater, in a punt, in a white shirt rolled at the elbows. If the physical convention were any indication, Willy Standish should have been a credit to his family. But there was also the streak of what his mother called morbidity, not knowing how to give it another name. Everything else she approved. It was right to use a mild slang, to exhaust your body in violent games, to shoot at pheasants, to spend a riotous evening with young women from the theatre. These were the pastimes and the privileges of the governing classes. But when Willy said: I’m going to leave the Army, why, because it makes me miserable, it also made no sense. This, decided his mother, was the strain of morbidity. The schoolroom water-colours that she still kept in a drawer in her writing desk were, well, the quaint relics of a precocity that had pleased her at the time. It was not queer to have a child who painted passably in water-colour. It was queer to have a son who left the Army to become a painter. One patronized art, sometimes, one didn’t produce it. But even more nonsensical was Willy’s later announcement: I’m engaged to a girl called Kitty Goose, who is she, she teaches in the school at Little Swaffham, she’s the daughter of a Norwich harness maker. His mother took to her sofa with a pad soaked in eau-de-Cologne.

Everyone always worked themselves up, felt Willy Standish. He liked to enjoy himself. He liked to lie in a hot bath after tennis. He liked to dabble in paint, or not, just as he felt inclined. I shall be a painter, he said. Because you had to do something, and provided you did it pleasurably, this was the important consideration, provided you could wring the last drop of pleasure from living, it did not matter if you approached the problem with any specific ability. Though he did have a talent of a sort, a kind of sensuous ability with colour that made people exclaim, if they did not know already that Willy Standish aspired to paint.