‘I don’t know, I’ll find out. Or better still, if he proposes to me I’ll tell him there are a few points you’d like to clear up with him before I answer. Not that he’s shown much sign seriously of being about to propose. I have to admit that.’

‘I’m sure it’s only up to you, Miss. Although I still think we ought to have had one of those diamanté combs.’

‘You really think that would do the trick? Oh Ellen, do I want to be loved for my hair ornaments?’

Ida, coming into her daughter’s room to see if she was ready to go down to the drawing room with her, heard their laughter and had expostulated, ‘Children, children,’ thinking that her whole family must be helping Cicely to dress, before she realized that Cicely was alone with her maid.

Ellen immediately assumed an intensely serious expression, inserted the last of the hairpins, admired her handiwork, said ‘There we are, Miss. Good Evening, Miss,’ and left the room, spoiling the effect by momentarily reinserting her angular form round the corner of the door to say ‘Good luck Miss,’ in a loud whisper.

‘You shouldn’t encourage her, Cicely,’ said Ida, genuinely shocked.

‘I don’t need to,’ said Cicely cheerfully. ‘She does very well without.’

Lord Lilburn had lost his second-best set of shirt studs. His wife Olivia had gone up to her room early, before the dressing bell had rung, and having changed quickly – her widely admired ‘natural look’ was often achieved by the simple expedient of not taking much trouble over her clothes – had settled herself on a chintz-covered chaise-longue in front of her bedroom fire with a small leather-covered volume in her hand. Lionel Stephens had been reading it earlier that day after the shooting lunch. He had a number of these little pocket editions and she had asked him what this one was and had been pleasantly surprised to find that for once it was not Greek. ‘I love Ruskin,’ she had said. ‘Even when I think he’s talking nonsense, I love the sound of it.’ Lionel had immediately taken a gold pencil out of another pocket and written ‘O.L. from L.S. Oct 30th 1913’. The book was Frondes Agrestes, passages from Ruskin’s Modern Painters – ‘chosen’, it said, ‘at her pleasure by the author’s friend the younger lady of the Thwaite, Coniston.’

Olivia wondered who the lady of the Thwaite might have been and thought idly how pleasant it would be to have a distinguished philosopher and sage as a close neighbour and friend and to be allowed by him to make selections from his works for publication in slim leather volumes. She had always thought she would like to be a friend to very clever people. Lionel Stephens was clever – he could talk about anything. He had another quality she liked very much, which was that he could think about anything, that was to say there was nothing he was not prepared to consider, either seriously or not so seriously, and this open-mindedness, or openness to the possibilities of things seemed to Olivia a very attractive quality, and one which her immediate social circle – which was really her husband’s social circle, since before her youthful marriage she had lived quietly among innumerable country cousins – did not freely provide. She thought Lionel would be a good example for her son Charlie to follow, and hoped that as the boy grew up she would be able to arrange for them to see a good deal of each other.