‘You know what life is like here,’ she now wrote, adding to a letter she had started the day before to her cousin and best friend Everilda Shakerly. ‘Of course too heavenly – but no men in the mornings – I think darling Randolph considers conversation between the sexes immoral before lunch, like reading novels. Even Minnie has never been able to persuade him to ask a few non-sporting men to keep us amused during the day. Never mind, yesterday the two boys, Tommy Farmer and the schoolboy grandson, were given a day off because Randolph thought he should ask a couple of boring neighbours to shoot in their places. We went bicycling by the river

– so pretty. I didn’t tell le petit Farmer all I knew about you and son Papa – he has not half the father’s dash but something could be made of him – he has a sort of calf-love for Cicely the eldest granddaughter but it won’t come to anything – he’s to be in London next year – rather surprisingly loves Wagner – would he do for your Agnes, do you suppose? He is the eldest son and there is coal beneath the Park …’

Olivia was reading about ancient Rome. The governess who had given her lessons as a child and who was a remarkably ignorant woman had nevertheless told her that the correct thing to do was always to follow ‘a course of reading’, which meant having on hand one serious book and one less serious. The French governess who had succeeded her for a year when Olivia was sixteen had added the necessity for something in that language as well; so that Olivia’s present tasks were The Grandeur that was Rome by F. W. Stobart (she had read The Glory that was Greece the year she was pregnant with Charlie) and Turgenev’s Smoke in the Garnett’s translation. She was enjoying both of these very much, but she detested Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and sometimes cheated by reading a poem out of a small book called Les Cent Meilleurs Poèmes instead. On the whole, though, she was strict with heself, did not skimp or skip and left Turgenev until last; she was even struggling to produce an English version of Lamartine’s Le Lac, but she was not at all satisfied with it. Turgenev she adored. She felt there was no English novelist, even George Meredith, who created women she could so much admire or who showed such true perception about feelings. She wished her husband did not despise such reading; it seemed to her very important that people should understand about feelings and recognize them in themselves. By studying feeling, she thought, you would get better at it. It seemed to her as important to feel truthfully as to think truthfully. The novels most of her friends read and enjoyed seemed to her sentimental and it worried her that she was unable to explain the difference between that sort of novel and Turgenev to her husband. He read political biography he said, and the newspapers.