Snow (St. John Strafford, #2)

by John Banville

He knew Harbison’s kind, the minor blackguards in overly good suits tailored in London, speaking in the cut-glass accent of their caste and upbringing, masquerading as hard-riding gentlemen, scions of the few decent families that had stayed on in this benighted country after independence. Clubbable chaps who would do you a favor when they could, and then make sure you spent the rest of your life paying for it. Frequenters of the race course and the annual Royal Dublin Society Horse Show, fixed ornaments of the city’s better hotel bars and Jammet’s restaurant on Nassau Street. The gay blades who ran up bills with Mitchells the wine merchants and Smyths on the Green, grocers to the gentry, that gentry of which they considered themselves the last fine flowering.