How soon she began to realize that he was a pompous prig she could not remember. He was a sight-seeing bore, and took her the Roman rounds with a dutiful assiduity, and without ever allowing her to sit on a stone and use her eyes. Her jokes annoyed and never amused him; when she said that all the sights in Rome were called after London cinemas, he complained that she was insular, facetious and babyish. She was insular, really; she loved England and never thought abroad was worth the trouble it took getting there. Luke spoke Italian in such a dreadfully affected way that it embarrassed her to hear him.
It was on her honeymoon in Rome that she first met Rudolph Jocelyn. He made no great impression on her, being the antithesis of what she then so much admired. He was not bald, suave, or in any sense of the word a diplomat. On the contrary, he had a shock of tow-coloured hair, spoke indistinctly, dressed badly, and was always in a great hurry. Luke disapproved of him; he said that Jocelyn’s journalistic activities were continually getting the Embassy in trouble with the Italians. Besides, he kept low company and looked disreputable, and the fact that he spoke Italian like a native, and two dialects as well, failed to endear him to Luke. Some months later Sophia heard that he had mobilized the Italian army in a moment of light-heartedness; his newspaper splashed the martial news, and Rudolph Jocelyn was obliged to abandon journalism as a career.
Sophia had a happy character and was amused by life; if she was slightly disillusioned she was by no means unhappy in her marriage. Luke was as cold as a fish and a great bore; soon however she began to regard him as a great joke, and as she liked jokes she became quite fond of him when, which happened soon, she fell out of love with him. Also she saw very little of him. He left the house before she was properly awake in the morning, returning only in time to dress for dinner, then they dined out. Every Saturday to Monday they stayed with friends in the country. Sophia often spent weeks at a time with her father, in Worcestershire or Scotland. Luke seemed to be getting very rich. About twice a week he obliged her to entertain or be entertained by insufferably boring business people, generally Americans. He explained that this must be regarded as her work so she acquiesced meekly, but unfortunately she was not very good at her work, as Luke never hesitated to tell her. He said that she treated the wives of these millionaires as if they were cottage women and she a visiting duchess. He said they were unused to being treated with condescension by the wives of much poorer men, who hoped to do business with their husbands. Sophia could not understand all this; she thought she was being wonderful to them, but they seemed to her a strange species.
‘I simply don’t see the point of getting up at six all the time you are young and working eighteen hours a day in order to be a millionaire, and then when you are a millionaire still getting up at six and working eighteen hours a day, like Mr Holst. And poor Mrs Holst, who has got up at six too all these years, so that now she can’t sleep on in the morning, only has the mingiest little diamond clip you ever saw. What does it all mean?’
Luke said something about big business and not tying up your capital. Mr Holst was the head of the firm of which Luke’s was the London office, and the Holst visits to England were a nightmare for Sophia. She was obliged to see a great deal of Mrs Holst on these occasions and to listen by the hour to her accounts of their early struggles as well as to immense lectures on business ethics.
‘Lady Sophia,’ Mrs Holst would say, fingering her tiny diamond clip, ‘I hope that you and Sir Luke fully realize that Mr Holst has entrusted his good name – for the good of the business, Lady Sophia, is the good name of Mr Holst, and in fact Mr Holst has often said to me that Mr Holst’s business is Mr Holst – well, as I was saying, this good name is entrusted into Sir Luke’s keeping and into your keeping, Lady Sophia. I always say a business man’s wife should be Caesar’s wife. As I have told you, Lady Sophia, Mr Holst worked for twenty hours a day for thirty years to build up this business. Often and often I have heard him say “My home is my office and my office is my home” and that, Lady Sophia, is the profound truth. Now, as I was saying …’ and so it went on.
Sophia, who was never able to get it out of her head that the City was a large room in which a lot of men sat all day doing sums, and who was of course quite unable to distinguish between stockbrokers, billbrokers, bankers and jobbers, found these lectures almost as incomprehensible as the fact that Mrs Holst should take so much interest in her husband’s profession when it had only produced, for her, such a wretched little diamond clip. Sophia loved jewels, she had fortunately inherited very beautiful ones of her own from her mother, and Luke, who was not at all mean, often added to them when he had brought off a deal.
The train stopped. The Scotch officer, his wife, the nasty lady and their puppies all
