Ida was in every way conventional – she had come to the conclusion that the Irish Land Acts might be all right only when she had seen that they were being brought forward by the impeccably aristocratic George Wyndham and supported in Ireland by the quite enormously grand Lord Dunraven – but at the same time she was a serious woman and she found Charles Farquhar difficult to talk to. He was not at all like her husband, who was in the habit of discussing his diplomatic work with her and finding her ruthlessly down-to-earth judgements about people helpful. John Nettleby was not the son of his parents for nothing and had a tendency to romanticize the possessors of charm. It was perhaps his desire to guard against this tendency which had encouraged him to marry Ida. ‘At least,’ Minnie had said, who had hoped for something a little more dashing in the way of a daughter-in-law, ‘he’ll be able to trust her.’

Ida was eminently trustworthy, and it was a small contributory factor towards the absolute correctness of her husband the diplomat that from an early age he had had at the back of his mind the idea that his mother was not. Whether right or wrong, this view had made him correct, because it had made him cautious, and where emotions were concerned so cautious as to be almost cold; but Ida looked up to him, and was uneasy when she discerned in the children characteristics unlike his, and which she feared might have skipped a generation. Frivolity might be expected to have come from Minnie, but there was a kind of whimsicality which in Ida’s view was no better and which she found in Sir Randolph. It was just when he least seemed to mean what he said that he was being most serious, that was what she sometimes suspected, and that was what she sometimes seemed to see in Osbert. Contrariness, Nanny called it. Whatever it was, Ida thought, it was calculated to annoy.

Charles Farquhar was not interested in Irish land reform. Hearty agreement with Ida’s view seemed the easiest way out of a prolonged discussion.

‘Rather,’ he said, with the emphasis on the last syllable. ‘I should jolly well say so. And what does Miss Cicely think, I wonder? I’ll bet all she cares to know about Ireland is that you can get some dashed good hunting there.’

Cicely was opposite him across the narrow table. She acknowledged politely that she’d had a week in West Meath, but privately resented being interrupted in her conversation with Tibor Rakassyi: they had been talking about polo, and he had been telling her that he was renowned and feared throughout Hungary for his ferocious play. She had thought his boasting delightful and was flattered by his anxiety to impress her. She would have liked to enlarge in similar style upon her exploits over the Irish banks, but felt her mother’s eye upon her. Ida disapproved of showing off.