These pleasant thoughts were interrupted by her husband coming rather suddenly into her room and saying, ‘That ass Mathews has left half my things behind.’

‘What a nuisance. But you look very nice.’

‘I’ve got the wrong studs on.’

‘No one could possibly guess.’

‘They’re too smart. Frightfully bad form. Look as if I’m going to some damn ball.’

‘Oh Bob, I’m quite sure no one would think that. They’re so small. I think they look very nice.’

‘You don’t understand. You never do understand how much these things matter. Gilbert Hartlip is always impeccably turned out.’

‘Impeccably boring too, I always think.’

‘How can you be so frivolous, Olivia? Gilbert carries a great deal of weight.’

‘Of weight? What can you mean? No one could possibly call Gilbert fat.’

‘You are being obtuse on purpose. I suppose you think it’s funny. Gilbert carries weight in Society.’

‘Oh, Society.’

‘Don’t dismiss it in that way, Olivia. Society is very important. I hate going into it inadequately equipped.’

‘It’s not a battle surely?’

‘In some ways it is not unlike a battle.’

‘In which he with the too-smart shirt studs bites the dust?’

‘Well…’ he began unwillingly to smile. ‘Sustains a setback maybe.’

Olivia laughed, putting her head with its thick crown of auburn hair back against the blue chaise-longue. ‘You are quite ridiculous.’

‘It’s all very well. You can dismiss these things if you like, but they are the structure of our lives and if we lose respect for them we lose respect for ourselves.’

‘My self-respect is not in the slightest bit connected with your shirt studs. But what you mean is I can afford to be frivolous because I am sustained and maintained by you and the position you confer on me by making me your wife, and I see that that is true and I always do know perfectly well that it is true, although at the same time it makes me feel quite extraordinarily leaden inside. So I try not to think about it and to think about Charlie instead, so here I am reading about education. It says here that he must be brought up in close communion with nature, Bob. We could manage that, now couldn’t we? And what about this?’ She opened the book at the place where she had left the marker and read out, ‘ “I believe an immense gain in the bodily health and happiness of the upper classes would follow on their steadily endeavouring, however clumsily, to make the physical exertion they now necessarily exert in amusements definitely serviceable. It would be far better, for instance, that a gentleman should mow his own fields, than ride over other people’s.” What about that, Bob?’

‘You are trying to provoke me and I shall not rise. Who is this ape? John Ruskin – well, there you are then. Art and life are two very different things, as I believe he found out when he tried marriage, did he not? Where did you get this rubbish?’