“Human nature is not the same in England as anywhere else.”  That was her confounded mockery!

“Well, I don’t know much about this small country”—­’No, thank God!’ thought Soames—­“but I should say the pot was boilin’ under the lid everywhere.  We all want pleasure, and we always did.”

Damn the fellow!  His cynicism was—­was outrageous!

When lunch was over they broke up into couples for the digestive promenade.  Too proud to notice, Soames knew perfectly that Annette and that fellow had gone prowling round together.  Fleur was with Val; she had chosen him, no doubt, because he knew that boy.  He himself had Winifred for partner.  They walked in the bright, circling stream, a little flushed and sated, for some minutes, till Winifred sighed: 

“I wish we were back forty years, old boy!”

Before the eyes of her spirit an interminable procession of her own “Lord’s” frocks was passing, paid for with the money of her father, to save a recurrent crisis.  “It’s been very amusing, after all.  Sometimes I even wish Monty was back.  What do you think of people nowadays, Soames?”

“Precious little style.  The thing began to go to pieces with bicycles and motor-cars; the War has finished it.”

“I wonder what’s coming?” said Winifred in a voice dreamy from pigeon-pie.  “I’m not at all sure we shan’t go back to crinolines and pegtops.  Look at that dress!”

Soames shook his head.

“There’s money, but no faith in things.  We don’t lay by for the future.  These youngsters—­it’s all a short life and a merry one with them.”

“There’s a hat!” said Winifred.  “I don’t know—­when you come to think of the people killed and all that in the War, it’s rather wonderful, I think.  There’s no other country—­Prosper says the rest are all bankrupt, except America; and of course her men always took their style in dress from us.”

“Is that chap,” said Soames, “really going to the South Seas?”

“Oh! one never knows where Prosper’s going!”

“He’s a sign of the times,” muttered Soames, “if you like.”

Winifred’s hand gripped his arm.

“Don’t turn your head,” she said in a low voice, “but look to your right in the front row of the Stand.”

Soames looked as best he could under that limitation.  A man in a grey top hat, grey-bearded, with thin brown, folded cheeks, and a certain elegance of posture, sat there with a woman in a lawn-coloured frock, whose dark eyes were fixed on himself.  Soames looked quickly at his feet.  How funnily feet moved, one after the other like that!  Winifred’s voice said in his ear: 

“Jolyon looks very ill; but he always had style.  She doesn’t change —­except her hair.”

“Why did you tell Fleur about that business?”

“I didn’t; she picked it up.  I always knew she would.”

“Well, it’s a mess.  She’s set her heart upon their boy.”