Highland Fling by Nancy Mitford Read Free Book Online

friends who had met them never could account for this. They were charming, rather cultured people, obviously devoted to their only child, and Jane when she wasactually with them seemed to return their devotion. That she was a great trial to them there could be no doubt. Men fell easily in love with her, and she was usually having an affair with some really unsuitable person. As she was most indiscreet she had acquired, among people of her parents’ generation, a very bad reputation, which was hardly deserved. Up to the present she had not married, having a sort of vague idea in her head that she wished to be the wife of a genius. In the same way that some girls will not marry for love alone but must have money too, only allowing themselves to fall in love with a millionaire, so Jane thought that she could never be happy except with a really clever man; she had little intellect of her own, and needed the constant stimulus of an intellectual companion.
    She intended to marry when and only when she had found the ideal person, but she was in no hurry. The idea rather bored her, and the example of her married friends (except for Walter and Sally) was, to say the least of it, unpromising.
    Meanwhile, she fell in love right and left, and had many violent but short-lived love affairs, in the course of which she burnt her own fingers comparatively seldom.
    The train was full of sportsmen, their wives and dogs, going North. The most depressing sight in the world, thought Jane, is a married couple travelling. The horror of it. Not only must they sleep, eat, walk, drive and go to the theatre together all their lives, but they cannot escape even in the train. It brings home to one what marriage really means more than anything else, except perhaps seeing a married couple at the bridge table. What is the terrifying chain which binds these wretched people together so inevitably? Love? Hardly, or they would look happier. Intellectual companionship? No, that certainly not; the misery on their faces is only exceeded by the boredom. Habit and convention, no doubt, aided by the natural slavishness of women. Probably they are too stupid to realize their own unhappiness. They all look terribly, terribly stupid.
    As Jane glanced around, her attention was particularly attracted by one couple who seemed rather different from the rest, and yet in a way typical of them all.
    The husband was an example of sporting Englishman to be seen by the dozen on every racecourse and with whom the Embassy is nightly packed. He was tall, rather burly, with a phenomenally small head, mouse-coloured hair and reddish moustache. Although possessing almost classical features he was as ugly an object as could be imagined.
    His wife was more unusual looking. She was immensely long and thin, so that she appeared, as it were, out of drawing, like an object seen in a distorting mirror. Her face, terribly thin and haggard, was completely dominated by an enormously long thin nose which turned up slightly at the very end; her large dark eyes were set close together and looked short-sighted. Her mouth was simply a red line, showing up startlingly on her dead white skin with green shadows. Jane thought that she had never seen anyone look so much like an overbred horse. She even ate like one, appearing to sniff every mouthful cautiously before she allowed herself to nibble at it, as though she might at any moment shy away from the cable. Her husband behaved to her just like a groom with a nervous mare. Jane felt that he must have had difficulty in accustoming her to being handled.
    She was well-dressed in an English sort of way; her tweeds were perfectly cut, and everything she wore was obviously expensive. Beautiful rings gave the uncomfortable impression of being too big for her fingers, which were abnormally thin and nervous. Her pearls were real. She wore a regimental badge of diamonds and rubies on a thick crêpe de Chine jumper. While lacking any real
chic
, she gave an