Noble in Reason by Phyllis Bentley

resume his meal and address me with a false bonhomie, making some feeble jest about Mr. M which was very unlike his usual stern incisive utterances. Presently he laid down his knife and fork again and stole another look at Beatrice’s letter.
    This was all very well; but after these moments of febrile joy Henry would sink alarmingly into an abyss of gloom. He said nothing of his trouble to me, but it was not difficult to guess that his uncertain prospects, the improbability of his being able to marry for many years, the present blight on the family’s fortunes, weighed heavily upon his spirits. I remember particularly his distress on his twenty-first birthday, whichoccurred about the middle of this London period. A number of letters and parcels awaited him on the table, amongst which was a letter from Beatrice. Henry opened this first and showed that dark radiance which became his handsome face so well. Then he turned to my father’s present, which proved to be a pair of serviceable but not particularly elegant gloves. Henry burst out uncontrollably:
    â€œJohn had a gold watch!”
    I exclaimed in distress.
    â€œDon’t take any notice of what I said, Chris,” said Henry, turning to me however a ravaged face: “Father does the best he can.”
    I understood perfectly that it was the decay, the deterioration, in the Jarmayne family’s standing, symbolised by the descent from watch to gloves, not the mere value, which troubled him; any mean calculation was entirely alien to Henry’s proud spirit.
    His distress on such occasions distressed me, the more so as I instinctively felt—I say instinctively because the grounds for my conviction were obscure to me—that John would win the game with Beatrice, though Henry seemed much the more attractive proposition of the two to me. On these days of gloom I tried to be as nice to Henry as I could: to abstain from those faults which annoyed him in me. I washed and brushed with especial care; I straightened the somewhat mean though decent appointments of the supper table; I remembered to make up the fire before he came in; I sat, sensibly upright, in a chair to read instead of sprawling all over the rug or broken-springed settee. Henry saw these efforts and rewarded me with a smile, kind though a trifle stiff and wan.
    A day or two after the excitement of a letter from Beatrice, came the agitation of Henry’s reply to her. Henry wrote unadorned and rather too outspoken letters; strict truthfulnesswas always his intention, and like my father he said what he meant rather too clearly to sound urbane. (I was appalled, when he once showed me a paragraph in a letter he had written to Messrs. Cockerylls, by its bald ferocity.) Surprised and affronted by his correspondents’ reactions, he had come to regard letter-writing as a difficult and puzzling task, and of course a letter to Beatrice was an immensely important occasion. Accordingly the table had to be cleared of every other object, the writing-tools symmetrically displayed; silence was sternly requested and an absence of fidgeting somewhat irritably demanded. If possible, therefore, I always went out on my bicycle while Henry wrote to Beatrice, and was heartily glad when the process was over. For a few days after the despatch of his letter, Henry was cheerful and hopeful, positively whistled while shaving and told anecdotes of the staff and customers at Messrs. Cockerylls’ which were less mordant than his usual scornful exposures. But then began the long agony of waiting for a reply, closed only by the violent joy and despair of its arrival. So that the majority of Henry’s days were not happy ones.
    As time went on, too, it seemed to me also that Henry was not as happy in his music classes as he had been at first. He now worked for longer hours even than before, but when he lifted his head from his music-paper, he had a harassed and perplexed expression on his face, and sometimes