Chapter 26

Lady Roehampton was not a young woman; but she was still, though not without taking a certain amount of trouble, beautiful. This question of the middle-aged woman’s beauty and desirability has never sufficiently been exploited by novelists. It is one of the minor dramas of life; yet who are we to call it minor, when to the women concerned it involves the whole purpose of their existence? Lady Roehampton, for instance, certainly thought she knew no other means of self-expression and believed that she desired none, t…