Free The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

look around everywhere," Lord Kessler said. "Look at anything and everything."
    "You really should," said Gerald. "You know, the house is never open to the public, Nick."
    Lord Kessler himself took him off into the library, where the books were apparently less important than their bindings, which
     were as important as could be. The heavy gilding of the spines, seen through the fine gilt grilles of the carved and gilded
     bookcases, created a mood of minatory opulence. They seemed to be books in some quite different sense from those that Nick
     used and handled every day. Lord Kessler opened a cage and took down a large volume: Fables Choisies de La Fontaine, bound in greeny-brown leather tooled and gilded with a riot of rococo fronds and tendrils. It was an imitation of nature
     that had triumphed as pure design and pure expense. They stood side by side to admire it, Nick noticing the pleasant smell
     of Lord Kessler's clean suit and discreet cologne. He wasn't allowed to hold the book himself, and was given only a glimpse
     of the equally fantastic plates, peopled with elegant birds and animals. Lord Kessler showed the book in a quick dry way that
     was not in itself dismissive but allowed for Nick's ignorance and perhaps merely polite interest. In fact Nick loved the book,
     but didn't want to bore his host by asking for a longer look. It wasn't clear if it was the jewel of the collection or had
     been chosen at random.
    "It's all rather . . . " Lord Kessler said.
    After a moment, Nick said, "I know . . . "
    After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively
     modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. "What have you found there?" said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone.
     "Ah, you're a Trollope man, are you?"
    "I'm not sure I am, really," said Nick. "I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and
     his 'great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters'?"
    Lord Kessler paid a moment's wry respect to this bit of showing-off, but said, "Oh, Trollope's good. He's very good on money."
    "Oh . . . yes . . . " said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice
     which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. "To be honest, there's a lot of him I haven't yet read."
    "You must know that one, though," said Lord Kessler.
    "No, this one is pretty good," Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of
     books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten, by some fertile process
     of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. He had a sense, which was perhaps only
     his own self-consciousness, of some formal bit of business, new to him but deeply familiar to his host, being carried out
     in a sociable disguise.
    "You were at school with Tobias?"
    "Oh . . . no, sir." Nick found he'd decided not to mention Barwick Grammar. "We were at Oxford together, both at Worcester
     College . . . Though I read English and Toby of course read PPE."
    "Quite . . ." said Lord Kessler, who perhaps hadn't been sure of this fact. "You were contemporaries."
    "Yes, we were, exactly," said Nick, and the word seemed to throw a historic light across the mere three years since he had
     first seen Toby in the porter's lodge and felt a sudden obliviousness of everything else.
    "And you took a First?"
    Nick loved the murmured challenging confidence of the question because he could answer "Yes." If it had been no, if he'd got
     a Second like Toby, he felt everything would have been different, and a lie would have been very ill-advised.
    "And how do you rate my nephew's chances?" said Lord Kessler with a smile, though it wasn't clear to Nick what contest, what