There certainly was.  And as I looked at them I thought:  Viola has done an irreparable injury to her family, to all these charming people.  She has hurt her father and mother in their beauty and their dignity and their honour.  As for her sisters, she has ruined what they are much too well-bred to call their “chances.”  The story of the going off to Belgium with Jevons is spreading through the Close, and through the High School where Millicent teaches, and through the garrison.  They will try to hush it up, but they won’t be able to; it will reach Chatham and Dover.  If they go up to town it will follow them there.  Wherever they go it will ultimately follow them.  She has struck at the solidarity of the family.  To be sure, it was the solidarity of the family that drove her to strike at it.  But if you were to tell Canon and Mrs. Thesiger that they had driven her, that they had tied her up too tight, they wouldn’t see it.  They would say:  “We never stopped her going off to London.  But that wasn’t enough for her.  She must go off to Belgium with that man Jevons.  She must ruin us.”

And Viola knew that she had ruined them.

And there they were, all holding themselves well, and all well dressed—­the two youngest in white, the elders in light colours on a scale that deepened to Victoria’s old rose.  I remember them, even to what they wore and the pathos of their wearing it; they stood out so against the black panelling of the old room.  It was full of oak chests and bureaus and Chinese cabinets, and Madonnas in Italian frames, and red and white ivory chessmen, and little bookcases with books in white vellum with scarlet title-pieces, and family portraits, and saints in triptychs on golden backgrounds, and murderous assegais and the skins and horns of animals.  And the leaves of the old elms stuffed up the low, mullioned windows looking on the garden.

And somehow you were aware of great streams of empire and of race, streams of august tradition; of sanctity and heroism and honour, and beautiful looks and gentle ways and breeding, all meeting there.

I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought again of Jevons—­of Jevons as absolutely impossible.  You may say it was pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but there wasn’t any other way.

It wasn’t their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their behaviour.  I don’t think I ever met people who knew so well how to behave.

They kept it up.  All evening they behaved like people under some heavy calamity which they ignored for the comfort of their guest and for their own dignity.  And yet, even if I hadn’t known of their calamity, I must have felt it in the air.  They knew that I knew it; but that was all the more reason why they should ignore it; they wanted to remove from me the oppression of my knowledge.

During dinner, perhaps, you felt the tension of the catastrophe; any guest who knew as much as I did was bound to be aware of it.  It was in little sudden, momentary silences, in the hushed voices and half-scared movements of the butler and the parlourmaid, in the stiffness of the Canon’s lip, and in some shade of the elder girls’ manner to Viola.