So Vera consented to be received surreptitiously, by herself, and without receiving Frances and Anthony in her turn.  It had hurt her; but Stephen’s celebrity was a dressing to her wound.  He was so distinguished that it was unlikely that Frances, or Anthony either, would ever have been received by him without Vera.  She came, looking half cynical, half pathetic, her beauty a little blurred, a little beaten after seventeen years of passion and danger, saying that she wasn’t going to force Larry down their throats if they didn’t like him; and she went away sustained by her sense of his distinction and his repudiations.

And she found further support in her knowledge that, if Frances and Anthony could resist Lawrence, their children couldn’t.  Michael and Dorothy were acquiring a taste for him and for the people he knew; and he knew almost everybody who was worth knowing.  To be seen at the parties he and Vera gave in St. John’s Wood was itself distinction.  Vera had never forgotten and never would forget what Anthony and Frances had done for her and Ferdie when they took Veronica.  She wanted to make up, to pay back, to help their children as they had helped her child; to give the best she had, and do what they, poor darlings, couldn’t possibly have done.  Nicholas was all right; but Michael’s case was lamentable.  In his family and in the dull round of their acquaintance there was not anybody who was likely to be of the least use to Michael; not anybody that he cared to know.  No wonder that he kept up his old attitude of refusing to go to the party.  Lawrence Stephen had promised her that he would help Michael.

And Frances was afraid.  She saw her children, Michael, Nicholas and Dorothy, swept every day a little farther from the firm, well-ordered sanctities, a little nearer to the unclean moral vortex that to her was the most redoubtable of all.  She hid her fear, because in her wisdom she knew that to show fear was not the way to keep her children.  She hid her strength because she knew that to show it was not the way.  Her strength was in their love of her.  She had only used it once when she had stopped Nicky from going into the Army.  She had said to herself then, “I will never do that again.”  It wasn’t fair.  It was a sort of sacrilege, a treachery.  Love was holy; it should never be used, never be bargained with.  She tried to hold the balance even between their youth and their maturity.

So Frances fought her fear.

She had known that Ferdie Cameron was good, as she put it, “in spite of everything”; but she had not seen Lawrence Stephen, and she did not know that he had sensibilities and prejudices and scruples like her own, and that he and Vera distinguished very carefully between the people who would be good for Michael and Nicholas and Dorothy, and the people who would not.  She did not know that they both drew the line at Desmond.