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.’

Sir Reuben Hergesheimer looked across at Lord Lilburn and then let his eyes wander down the table past young Marcus and Gilbert Hartlip to Cicely’s luminous pale face and large, bright, slightly protruding eyes which at this moment were fixed teasingly on Charles Farquhar opposite her – teasingly but with a look in them which was not really amused nor even particularly friendly, for she did not altogether like Charles Farquhar. Sir Reuben thought how English all those faces were, seeing Lord Lilburn’s regular well-shaped features and luxuriant moustache, Marcus’s fair complexion and blue eyes less protuberant and less sparkling than his sister’s, Gilbert Hartlip’s thin, long-nosed, slightly ascetic air; and there came into his mind’s eye a very different face he would have liked to have seen there, a sallower skin, dark eyes, eyes if heredity had anything to do with it slightly turned down at the outer corners, giving an expression of subtlety and religious calm quite at variance with the looks of these English sportsmen, the face of the young man who would have been his son if only he had ever had a son.

He had married once, in 1883, in Johannesburg. He had been thirty, his bride ten years younger. She had been Susannah Mordecai, the daughter of his then employer in the mining corporation through which he was in those years in the process of making his fortune. She was a handsome gentle creature, but it turned out that she was unable to bear children and though he was fond of her it became increasingly easy to spend time away from her and increasingly difficult when he was with her to listen to what she said; she was quite stupid. Her father from being his employer became his partner and then his ex-partner. There was no real ill-feeling over the thing – Reuben Hergesheimer had always been generous in victory (that is, as long as the victory was total) – but inevitably relations between them had grown cooler. Susannah was fond of her family, fonder no doubt than if she had had children of her own, and when Reuben’s business interest took him so often to London that he decided to settle there she did not follow him. It was some years before they both accepted that the separation was final, some years again before she asked him for a divorce in order to marry a childhood friend, a widower with whom as far as he knew she had settled down happily in Johannesburg; it was years since he had heard from her.