Outbreak of Love by Martin Boyd

rather stimulating.”
    â€œIntellectually, or emotionally?”
    â€œOr financially?” The voice of Miss Rockingham, a muted foghorn from which in later life she removed the silencer, sounded its warning note. During the conversation she had been smoking, with great deliberation, a cigarette fixed in a holder six inches long. She had far more money than any of the girls they talked about and she wanted to be married. She was prepared, like Cousin Sophie, a guest at Government House twenty years earlier, to make a morganatic marriage. She was even prepared to marry Freddie Thorpe, finding, something in the same way as Diana with Wolfie, a rest for her complexity in his simple animal stupidity, though Wolfie was a moral giant compared with Freddie. It was true that she was five years older than he, but she had a beautiful figure and moved with unusual grace, and she thought that this combined with her income would make the difference negligible. With a contempt for those proprieties which a bourgeoise would allow to interfere with her pleasures, she was prepared to buy him as she would buy a fine horse. But he appeared hardly to be aware of her presence, and when Patrick Wendale said to him: “Why don’t you marry Marcia?” although he had never been to Rome, nor seen the headless nymph, nor willingly looked at any other statue in his life except when he attended the unveiling of a bronze general on horseback, he said: “She might be all right if one could knock off her head.”
    For Miss Rockingham, with her tremendous assets, was handicapped by a very long face, and did look surprisingly like a horse. This added to her grandeur, but not to her feminine charm. She was believed in Melbourne, with justification, to be grander than anyone at Government House. She was known to be on intimate terms with the Queen of Spain, with whom as a girl she had climbed trees in Windsor Great Park, and she was called “dearest Marcia” in five different languages by the royal family of Europe.
    â€œYou could have one each,” she went on, pressing the thorn into her breast, “the clever one for John and the jolly one for Freddie. If you brought them to live here it would be most stimulating—such war, such wit.”
    â€œIs one of them jolly?” asked Freddie.
    â€œThey’re both very nice girls,” said Sir Roland. He would have expressed his dislike of the conversation more forcibly, but even he was affected by the deference which Marcia Rockingham commanded.
    â€œI’ll ring up Mrs Radcliffe,” said Dolly putting down her coffee-cup on a satinwood table from Dorset, “and ask her if John may come instead of Freddie. I’ll say that he’s particularly fond of music. You are, aren’t you?”
    â€œI like tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan,” said John.
    â€œThat’s good enough.”
    In a few minutes she returned, looking guilty and amused. “I’m awfully sorry, I’ve messed it up,” she said. “Mrs Radcliffe thought I meant could John come as well, and she said of course, and then it was impossible to say that Freddie didn’t want to come.”
    â€œYou could have made something up,” said Freddie sulkily.
    â€œI know it’s awful, but I can’t be rude to people.”
    â€œWe’re not here to insult the populace,” said Sir Roland.
    â€œI don’t think Mrs Radcliffe would like being called the populace,” said Lady Eileen, threading a needle.
    â€œI’m sure the twins wouldn’t,” said Dolly. “Well, we’d better go and shed our glory on them.”
    â€œOnly reflected glory, dear, from us,” Lady Eileen reminded her. She and Sir Roland were not allowed by the protocol to attend parties in private houses.
    â€œDammit, I am a peeress,” said Dolly Wendale.
    â€œYou have to curtsy to my wife, Dolly,” said Sir Roland with friendly malice.
    â€œI