After voicing this alarming conjecture, she paced up and down the room, emitting from each nostril a long eddy of smoke like the trail of a ship briskly cutting the horizon. Throughout the room I was increasingly aware of the hardening of disapproval, just perceptible at first even on the immediate arrival of Miss Blaides: now not by any means to be denied. In fact a sense of positive disquiet swept through the small drawing-room so powerfully that mute condemnation scemed to rise in a thick cloud above the ‘comforts’, until its disturbing odour reached the ceiling and hung about the whole flat in vexed, compelling waves. This disapproval was on the part not only of Mrs. Conyers, but also—I felt sure—of my mother as well, who now began to make preparations to leave.
&
The description reminded me a little of Uncle Giles. The picture of Jeavons took on a more positive shape: not a particularly attractive one. ‘Realism goes with good birth,’ Lovell used to say, and he himself certainly showed this quality where his own relations were concerned. The state ment might be hard to substantiate universally, but, by recognising laws of behaviour operating within the microcosm of a large, consanguineous network of families however loosely connected, individuals born into such a world often gain an unsentimental grasp of human conduct: a grasp sometimes superior to that of apparently more perceptive persons whose minds are unattuned by early association to the constant give and take of an ancient and tenacious social organism. Of course, it does not always work that way, but Lovell, with his many limitations, was himself a good example of the principle.
&
Conyers had been dining with the Jeavonses. However, it appeared that she did not know them well, and, perhaps not greatly at ease in their society, she was clearly much relieved at finding, in myself, someone she knew of old. I was not sure that I myself was equally pleased, for, although I like Mrs. Conyers well enough, I thought it preferable to explore new ground like the Jeavons hous unobserved by old friends of my parents. However, nothing could have been less admonitory than Mrs. Conyers'’s manner towards myself; if admonition properly defines the attitude threatened, when one is young, by the presence of old family friends.
In appearance Mrs. Conyers retained, no doubt from her childhood, the harassed, uncertain expression of those who have for many years had to endure close association with persons addicted to practical joking.
&
‘What do you make of Maisky?’ asked Jeavons.
He spoke in a preoccupied, confidential tone, as if Miss Weedon’s reply might make all the difference by its orientation to plans on foot for Maisky’s education.
‘I don’t care for monkeys,’ said Miss Weedon.
‘Oh, don’t you’ said Jeavons.
He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon’s part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the general import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.
‘Molly has taken a great fancy to him,” he said, at last.
‘I know.’
‘Oh, well,” said Jeavons. “These fancies come and go.’
Miss Weedon made no attempt to deny the truth of that observation. Nor did she elaborate her dislike of monkeys. She continued to smile her arctic smile. Jeavons slowly strolled off again, as if to think out the implications of what Miss Weedon had said.
&
"Wait. and see,’ said Jeavons. ‘That was what Mr. Asquith used to say. Didn’t do us much good in 1914. I expect you were too young to have been in the last — Show?”
I thought that enquiry rather unnecessary, not by then aware that, as one grows older, the physical appearance of those younger than oneself offers only a vague indication of their precise age. To me, ‘the Armistice’ was a distant memory of my preparatory school: to Jeavons, the order to ‘cease fire’ had happened only the other day. The possibility that I might have been ‘in the war’ seemed perfectly conceivable to him.
&
The Jeavonses’ guests habitually flowed into every room in the house, so that to retire to talk, for example in Molly’s bedroom, or Jeavons’s dressing-room, would be considered not at all unusual. We moved, in fact, a short way up the stairs into a kind of boudoir of Molly’s, constricted in space and likely to attract only people who wanted to enjoy a nea A to-heart talk together: a place chiefly given over to cats, or three of which sat in an ill-humoured group at angles to one another, stirring with disapproval at this invasion of their privacy.
