Free A Marriage of Convenience by Tim Jeal

recollection which now made Clinton angriest. Esmond would have found it deliciously ironic that he, the world-weary broker, should intend to marry for love, when the young idealist was on the verge of a cynically profitable union. The ingenuity Esmond had shown in reversing these old roles, while talking about his virtuous actress, grated harshly on Clinton’s nerves. And what he had heard about the woman herself annoyed him almost as much as Esmond’s attitude.
    Here was an actress—possibly unsuccessful—in her thirties with a daughter to support from what she could earn in the most precarious of all professions. When offered riches and security by a devoted cultivated man, had she gone down on her knees and thanked God? Not she. It stung Clinton personally, as Esmond had probably known it would, that this unknown woman, with reasons for marrying quite as persuasive as those which had crushed his own resistance, had stood firm. By what right had she valued herself so highly? Or did he actually believe a word of it?
    At the ornamental gates which separated the square from the public highway, Clinton stopped abruptly, and then started back purposefully in the direction of the mews which ran behind Esmond’s house. A few shillings would be enough to elicit from a groom or stable-boy the name of Esmond’s actress and the theatre where she worked. Clinton did not intend to damage his brother’s chances with her, but what better medicine could there be for his bitterness than to find the woman a calculating bitch instead of an angel? And really there was nothing unlikely about an actress making a fool of Esmond, while casting around for an even bigger fish.
    With several days to kill before leaving for the country on his marital mission, Clinton would in any case have been curious to seethe woman capable of melting Esmond’s self-contained heart; now he had additional incentive. When the time came to propose to Sophie Lucas, it would be particularly consoling to reflect that if Esmond’s marriage ever happened, it would be, on the girl’s part, no more a mutual love-match than his own.

4
    Early the following evening, Clinton sat drinking brandy and water in the smoking room of the Cavalry Club, idly listening to snatches of conversation about the relative merits of cutting and pointing swords.
    ‘Experts be damned,’ an elderly general was saying, ‘Give a big strong fellow a sabre as sharp as you like … but can he make any impression at all on a leg of mutton covered in sacking and leather straps? That’s my point.’
    ‘You mean your edge, sir,’ laughed a younger officer.
    ‘In the Mutiny,’ said another, ‘the 9th Lancers had a short spike set in the hilts of their swords; in mêlées it was better than any kind of blade. A blow in the face with the hilt and that was that.’
    From there, the conversation passed on to whether the lance was an outmoded weapon. Looking around the room, from face to face, Clinton supposed that few if any of these officers would consider it reprehensible to marry for money. Most would undoubtedly label objections to such a time-honoured practice as sour grapes or humbug. As a rule, Clinton himself was largely immune to serious doubts about the accepted code of behaviour his class lived by—his faith in part due to social habit, in part to a cast-iron assurance of his position in society. If this certainty made him arrogant, it also left him almost entirely free of the ambitions and jealousies which drove the majority to try to outstrip each other. Esmond of course described this aristocratic virtue as complacency. Not for the first time since their meeting, Clinton cursed his brother. Nobody else on earth was better at forcing him up against his own inconsistencies and the questionable moral assumptions he shared with most of his friends.
    Rarely had he known the strange detachment he felt now, sitting in a room where he had previously been so much at home. What did he