Another way of putting it might have been that if he was not to have Olivia now this very minute in his arms then at least he was going to thrash Gilbert Hartlip when it came to shooting.

Aline’s thoughts, as she stood beside her husband – to stand once with one’s husband, she felt, fulfilled one’s obligations in that direction – were full of what she considered to be her discovery about Olivia.

Aline was known to her friends to have a kinder heart than mere acquaintances sometimes suspected. The congratulations she had offered to Olivia were genuinely meant. She hoped that she and Olivia might now become better friends, and if there was any way in which she could help to forward the intrigue between Olivia and Lionel she would be happy to give loyal and understanding support. Olivia’s horrified apprehension of the spirit of complicity implied in Aline’s friendliness was an accurate understanding. Aline felt that Olivia was now on her own level, but her feeling contained no malice and no triumph, she merely felt that now there need be no barriers between them.

Aline had had a strict upbringing. Her father had, as it was unkindly said, bought his way into Society for her sake; her looks and native wits had done the rest. She had made a good marriage, and on that basis had achieved a certain position as a London hostess. Her chief mentor in this last endeavour had been an older woman of impeccable taste and credentials, whose acolyte she had been for many years. In modelling herself on this great Edwardian hostess, Aline’s only consideration had been to be as like her as possible, in voice, manner and dress, to learn from her where to be and when, who to know and who not to know, how to charm, how to lie, how to laugh. These lessons learnt she would have liked now to progress to another role, that of mistress to an important man.

She had married Gilbert Hartlip as a result of a straight deal between their parents, social position in exchange for money – a deal on which her father had to some extent reneged in that it had turned out he meant to make his daughter and son-in-law wait until his death for most of his money. Discreet infidelities seemed in order; her first, with a famous figure of the time, handsome, brilliant, no longer young, no longer quite so promising, had been a disillusioning experience. He had kept her waiting once when she had come to see him in his comfortable bachelor apartments, and she had seen on his desk, left lying around with such carelessness that she wondered afterwards whether he had meant her to read them, love letters from what seemed to be half the married women in London. When he had arrived at last and she had faced him with the letters, he had been savagely unkind. She had taken defeat quietly. He went everywhere and was thought much of. She had no alternative.