"Ah," said Lord Kessler intelligently: "style as an obstacle."

Nick smiled. "Exactly… Or perhaps style that hides things and reveals things at the same time." For some reason this seemed rather near the knuckle, as though he were suggesting Lord Kessler had a secret. "James is a great interest of mine, I must say."

"Yes, you're a James man, I see now."

"Oh, absolutely!"-and Nick grinned with pleasure and defiance, it was a kind of coming out, which revealed belatedly why he wasn't and never would be married to Trollope.

"Henry James stayed here, of course. I'm afraid he found us rather vulgar," Lord Kessler said, as if it had been only last week.

"How fascinating!" said Nick.

"You might be rather fascinated by the old albums. Let me see." Lord Kessler went to one of the cupboards beneath the bookcases, turned a scratchy-sounding key and bent down to take out a pair of large leather-bound albums, which he carried over to a central table. Again the inspection was hurried and tantalizing. He stopped now and then, as the heavy pages fell, to display a Victorian photograph of the gardens, with their wide bald views over newly planted woods, or of the interiors, almost comically crowded with chairs and tables, vases on stands, paintings on easels, and everywhere, in every vista, the arching, drooping leaves of potted palms. Now the house seemed settled and seasoned, a century old, with its own historic light and odour, but then it was ostentatiously new. In the second album there were group photographs, posed on the steps of the terrace, and annotated in a tiny florid script: Nick wanted days to read them, countesses, baronets, American duchesses, Balfours and Sassoons, Goldsmids and Stuarts, numerous Kesslers. The gravel was bizarrely covered with fur rugs for the group that centred on Edward VII in a tweed cape and Homburg hat. And then, May 1903, a gathering of twenty or so, second row, Lady Fairlie, The Hon. Simeon Kessler, Mr Henry James, Mrs Langtry, The Earl of Hexham… a cheerful informal picture. The Master, with his thumb in his striped waistcoat, eyes shaded by a traveller's widebrimmed hat, looked rather crafty.