Chapter 51

That was on the occasion of his coming-of-age. His grandmother, and all his uncles with their wives, gathered at Chevron. Sebastian liked his grandmother. He had sufficient discrimination to respect in her a reality of which his mother and her friends achieved only a thin imitation by the greatest effort. His mother and her friends might be more amusing, more up-to-date; they were certainly more fashionable; but the Dowager Duchess carried an air of solid assurance which belonged to a less uneasy age. That slightly…