Actually, Lady Ripon, or the Countess de Grey, to employ the more flowery title she used before her husband inherited, has had a bad press. She did have lovers and her battle with the Marchioness of Londonderry over their mutual admirer, Harry Cust, was to go down in the records as the principal cat fight of pre-Great War Society – it resulted, or so the story goes, in the Londonderrys’ never addressing a single word to each other in private for thirty years. But Lady de Grey was more than that, almost single-handedly pioneering the formation of the Royal Opera Company and being one of the first hostesses to entertain artists as her social equals. Nevertheless, like Lady Hartlip in the novel, she did live a life of indulgence, of dinners and fittings and secret assignations, a life that must have seemed increasingly out of touch with the world of cars and flight and the movies and the Depression that was hovering just around the corner.

Like Hartlip in the novel, Lord Ripon was generally considered the best shot of his day but he had once, so the story goes, been caught practising with his loaders (as Gilbert Hartlip is discovered practising in the novel) – which somehow undid his reputation, just as Gilbert’s is undone for the reader. That was the key to their own self-regard: their trick, and the only thing that mattered, was to be naturally good at everything but never to have to try, never to work or study or learn, simply to be born great without effort; great sportsmen, great beauties.

Having established the Hartlips as Society emblems, Colegate, with a surgeon’s precision, proceeds to dismantle them. Delicately, she shows Aline’s boredom and bitterness, her plunging standards when it comes to casting her next lover, her borrowing of money she will never repay, her desperation to include others in her own discontented fall. Even so – for Colegate always resists the safe and smug condemnation of any character – Aline retains a kind of baseline honesty. She never quite succumbs to the need to conceal her origins and just when the reader is expecting her to pull rank over Hergesheimer, she laughs:

Of course the truth is I’m no more of an aristocrat than you are.

Sir Reuben had underestimated her. So had we. This is a core theme to the work, that if we can only retain a measure of honesty then all will not be quite lost. Aline Hartlip will probably survive, we suspect, because au fond she is not lying to herself.

Her husband, on the other hand, starting out as the classic English ‘Sportsman’ is revealed as a mass of nothing, with neither honesty nor the least scrap of self-knowledge. If any one of these individuals represents what went wrong with the values of the late Victorians and Edwardians, it is Gilbert Hartlip. Priding himself on doing things right, on his absolute probity, on his perfect taste and perfect breeding, he is in fact entirely without decency or fairness or compassion. Sir Randolph’s simple statement encapsulates this: ‘You were not shooting like a gentleman, Gilbert.’