Any day now, if he hadn’t already done so, he would take to pipe smoking, and getting drunk with the chaps from the rugby club on Saturday nights. He would drive a two-seater, and talk disparagingly of girls, and shoot crows in the copse, wherever it was, and plight his halfhearted troth to some landed family’s horsey daughter. None of that would entirely convince, either. In Dominic Osborne, something, some undefinable finish, would always be lacking. There would always be something amiss.
