Privileged Children Read Online Free PDF

Directoire frock which would have been the height of fashion had she been wearing stays beneath it, sat on one side of Alice, and on Alice’s other side there sat a strange man: a protégé of Clementina’s calledJames Bellinger, who was a struggling young actor of twenty-one. He was a lanky man, with big, lightly covered bones. He had a thin beaky nose and unbrushed blond hair. His eyes were large and green and he had hollow cheeks. Alice thought he looked like a wounded knight from one of the illustrations in her mother’s copy of the Morte d ’ Arthur . He was chain-smoking cheap cigarettes.
    Alice studied everyone’s appearance, and noticed the way in which they spoke and moved, but she did not listen very hard to the conversation. She did listen when Diana read out, in a flattened voice, a poem which she had written about her childhood. Diana had told Alice very little about her early life and Alice had presumed that this was because Diana’s childhood had been especially unhappy.
    Diana’s poem was called ‘Ignorance’, and it seemed to be saying, Alice thought, that the innocence of childhood was a bliss comparable to the false paradise of Limbo to which unbaptised babies went — until the innocence was ended, when it became a torment.
    Diana had grown up in a large country house in which, with the exception of one governess, everyone had been kind to her. She had not sensed, then, how bored she was, because she knew no other possible way of life than her own in the nursery and school room. Only after her coming out had she wanted to go to university, to learn about all the things of which she was so ignorant. Her affectionate parents had comforted her, teased her, grieved about her and refused to send her. At twenty-two she had married a man twenty years older than herself, a former Fenian who had been imprisoned for his politics, and who lived on an allowance from an aunt. Her parents, who had violently opposed the marriage, took no further notice of her. Proudly she had set out, after her husband’s death, to drown her sorrows in work and to be a true New Woman; but she had discovered, once she was penniless, that her happy childhood had prepared her to be nothing but the most old-fashioned kind of professional woman.
    ‘When women get the Vote,’ said Rose Pembridge hoarsely, ‘your sort of experience will be impossible.’
    ‘I wasn’t attacking the position of women, so much as …’began Diana, but she was interrupted.
    ‘But Diana,’ said Leo, ‘the fate which ought to have befallen you didn’t happen, did it? By your own talents and efforts you did, in fact, manage to support yourself by writing — a marvellous achievement in itself.’
    ‘I’d forgotten,’ murmured Diana, glancing down at the last few lines of the poem.
    ‘Of course,’ continued Leo, ‘I quite agree that, with the class structure and the position of women being as they are, the Honourable Diana Blentham, eligible débutante, would — as the penniless widow of an Irishman — become an entirely suitable kept mistress for the men who’d asked to marry her before she fell from grace. But a woman of your stamp doesn’t necessarily follow that natural course — and I don’t think that you should finish that autobiographical poem with a generalisation, even if it’s a wise one.’
    Diana looked straight through him and said, ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right.’
    Henry Johnson and Alice were gazing up at her. Diana saw her, stroked her head and smiled at her. Alice imitated the mildly interested, unaware expression which was on both the Woods’ faces.
    ‘Unlike Leo, I admire the sense of your poem immensely,’ said Augustus. ‘It’s the form I object to. Why write poetry if you’re going to make it as like prose as possible?’
    ‘You love all things purple and complicated, don’t you, Augustus?’ teased Clementina. ‘You just think that all poetry should be versification of Walter Pater’s prose.’
    ‘My