‘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.’

The truth is Olivia Lilburn understands that these things don’t matter at all, and it is that discovery that frightens her. Unlike Aline, she has not married for social advantage. She has simply married the kind of man she was expected to marry and now she is living the kind of life she expected to live. But somehow adulthood has brought her a clarity of vision that was not part of the deal. Unlike her mother, her sisters, her family and friends, she has come to see what their life is. Reluctantly, she has been cursed with the realization that the whole business is meaningless. She knows her husband is a silly man with silly preoccupations, that their endlessly repeating social round is not going anywhere, that they are living in an empty bubble.

Once she had said to him, ‘Supposing there are some other people somewhere, people we don’t know?’

He had looked at her seriously.

‘What sort of people?’

‘Perfectly charming people. Really delightful, intelligent, amusing, civilized … and we don’t know them, and nobody we know knows them. And they don’t know us and they don’t know anybody we know.’

Bob had thought for a moment and then he had said, ‘It’s impossible. But if it were not impossible, then I don’t think I should want to know such people. I don’t think I should find anything in common with them.’

In the last analysis, Olivia Lilburn cannot free herself and this, Colegate seems to be saying, is why she, and others like her, were doomed. Even those with the intelligence to realize that this mummery must come to an end, were somehow powerless to move on from it.

Olivia is given the opportunity to escape when she finds love with Lionel Stephens. He is a sportsman, too, the best shot of the party, but he is not demented, not greedy, not reckless. He is handsome and clever and cultured in a way that contrasts, almost alarmingly, with most of his class. He is well read. He is knowledgeable. And he loves Olivia Lilburn with all his heart. But, while he may have the strength required for the challenge, she is not brave enough to make the change, to weather the scandal, even simply to face the moral barriers presented by a discreet affair.

When Aline Hartlip congratulates Olivia on her conquest and seems, in so doing, to sweep her into her own shapeless, moral vacuum, Lionel’s chances are gone. Olivia’s feelings may not resemble Aline’s in any detail but the threat of somehow ending up as ‘another Lady Hartlip’ in the minds of those around her is enough to make her recoil. She lacks the courage to love without Society’s sanction until her lover’s death removes the risk of ruin and makes that love pure. From then on, Olivia may adore and worship the memory of Lionel to her heart’s content with absolute impunity. But she could not pick up the gauntlet that love threw down and finally this renders her a moral coward. In other words, if we are not brave in facing the future, if we are not prepared to fight for what we know is right, if we cannot defend our own values against the trivial, fluctuating fashions in morality, then we are lost.