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That same year, 1905, Francis’s own parents both died, leaving him master undisputed of a five-figure income; and the two cousins very nearly decided on living together, till Peter vetoed the idea on the grounds that “as Francis never got up before lunch or came home to dinner, he didn’t see much sense in the proposed arrangement.”

Nevertheless, bachelor existence in that barrack of a house at Lowndes Square, soon began to pall. “I shan’t be dining at home to-night, Smith,” became the almost daily word to the elderly, dignified, parlour maid as she handed our Mr. Jameson his top-hat of a morning; and on the rare evenings when he did dine at home, it was usually in company—business acquaintances, school friends, old cronies of his father’s, or—and this frequently—the Baynets.

Heron Baynet, the Harley Street diagnostician who was knighted in the 1918 Birthday List for his research-work in the treatment of shell-shock and other nervous disorders, had been one of the consultants attending Jameson senior in his illness. He had taken an instinctive liking to the young man; asked him to call. Peter, accepting the invitation, met a married daughter, Violet; a son in the Army; and Patricia—tall, blond, twenty-one, dignified, rather reserved in her speech, tolerably contemptuous of the average young man, cultivating alternately the critique of pure reason at home and the outside edge at Prince’s skating-rink. … Twelve months after their first meeting, in March, 1906, these two married.

A marriage of affection, kindred tastes and mutual respect. A marriage which appealed to them (both had a strong, youthful contempt for sentiment) as “eminently reasonable.” A marriage into which both entered with the definite certainty that there would be no passion, no misunderstandings, no petty economies, no vital divergences of opinion. A marriage which—as most marriages—ended by utterly confuting all their original ideas about it.