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The strength and clarity of her being, her meticulous accuracy and truthfulness, operated as a reproach to the mediocrity and muddle which Mary felt to be her own natural medium. Paula had a hard cool dignity which had been quite unimpaired by her divorce, the details of which Mary never learnt, though it was generally known that Richard Biranne was an irresponsible chaser of women.
Paula cared very much about what might be called ‘moral style’. Someone had once said of her, not quite justly, ‘She wouldn’t mind what awful thing you did so long as you didn’t talk about it in a certain kind of way.’
Though Ducane had never fully realized it, one reason why his career as a barrister had been less than totally successful was that he lacked the capacity to conceive of any kind of villainy of which he would not have been capable himself.
Ducane was capable of picturing himself as not only aspiring to be, but as actually being, the just man and the just judge. He did not rightly know what to do with these visions. Sometimes he took them, now that he had removed himself from the possibility of actually becoming a real judge, for a sort of harmless idealism. Sometimes they seemed to him the most corrupting influences in his life. What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely that in
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‘It expresses my love for Propertius and my love for Latin. Love needs to be expressed, it needs to do work. This may be something which cannot be stated in your devilish metaphysics without being somehow falsified, but it is ... an indubitable good. And if there is an indubitable good within one’s reach one stretches out one’s hand.’
Like all true Earls Courters, Ducane despised Chelsea.
He looked at them with the vague face of one who, on his way to the scaffold, hears his name distantly hallooed in the crowd.
