The will! It seemed that they talked of nothing but the will, and the part that Francis played in it, singularized as he was by the largest of all the personal bequests (his mother and Mary-Tess were beneficiaries of a special trust), surprised and puzzled his family. It was Gerry O’Gorman who summed it up briefly and bluntly: you would think Frank could study art on less than the income from a cool million.

Not that he was just to have the income; the old man had left it to him outright. Now, what would Frank know about handling money in that quantity? But Francis remembered what his grandfather had said about learning the grammar of money, and before he took the dismal voyage back to Oxford he had given directions as to what was to be done with his money when it became available, and even Gerry had to admit that he had handled it well.

So Francis returned to Corpus Christi and Canterbury House, and the inner rooms of the Ashmolean, a rich man, in terms of what he was and what responsibilities he had. Rich, and with the prospect of being richer, for his grandfather had made him a participant in that family trust which at the moment carried Grand’mère, and Aunt, and his mother and Mary-Tess, and as these died off his portion would increase. You’re sitting pretty, boy, said Gerry, and Sir Francis, putting it with the dignity of a President, said that his future was assured.

How quick people are to say that someone’s future is assured when they mean only that he has enough money to live on! What young man of twenty-four thinks of his future as assured? In one respect, Francis knew that his future was painfully uncertain.

He had known something of girls at Spook—a little hugging and tugging at parties, though the girls of that time were cautious about what he still thought of as The Limit. He had experienced The Limit in a Toronto brothel with a thick-legged woman who came from a country district—a township—not inappropriately named Dummer, and for a month afterward he had fretted and fussed and examined himself for the marks of syphilis, until a doctor assured him that he was as clean as a whistle. On these slender experiences he was sure he knew a good deal about sex, but of love he had no conception. Now he was in love with his cousin Ismay Glasson, and she was plainly not in love with him.

Perhaps she was in love with Charlie Fremantle. He met them together often, and when he was with her she talked a good deal about Charlie. Charlie found Oxford painfully confining; he wanted to get out into the world and change it for the better, whether the world wanted it or not. He had advanced political ideas. He had read Marx—though not a great deal of him, for Charlie found thick, dense books a clog upon his soaring spirit. He had made a few Marxist speeches at the Union, and was admired by other untrammelled spirits like himself. His Marxism could be summed up as a conviction that whatever was, was wrong, and that the destruction of the existing order was the inevitable preamble to any beginning of the just society; the hope of the future lay with the workers, and all the workers needed was sympathetic leadership by people like himself, who had seen through the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bloody-mindedness of the upper class into which they themselves had been born. In all of this Ismay was his submissive disciple. If anything, she was even more vehement than he against the old (people over thirty) who had made such a mess of affairs. Of course, they dressed their ideas up in language more politically resonant than this, and they had plenty of books—or Ismay had—that supported their emotions, which they called their principles.

Charlie was just twenty-one and Ismay was nineteen. Francis, who was twenty-four, felt middle-aged and dull when he listened to them. His was not a political mind, nor was he quick in argument, but he was convinced that something was wrong with Charlie’s philosophy. Charlie had not spent three years at Carlyle Rural, or he might have thought differently about the aspirations and potentialities of the workers. Charlie’s grandfather had not hacked his way out of the forest and into the seat of a Chairman of the Board with a woodsman’s broadaxe. Educate the workers, said Charlie, and you will see the world changed within three generations. Thinking of Miss McGladdery, Francis was not so sure the workers took readily to education or to any change that went beyond their immediate and obvious betterment. Charlie was a Canadian like himself, but Charlie’s family were Old Money. Francis had seen enough of Old Money at Colborne College to know that hypocrisy, stupidity, and bloody-mindedness were just as natural to that class as Charlie said they were. Francis was cursed with an ability, not great but real, to see both sides of the question. It never occurred to him that three years in age might make a difference in Charlie’s outlook, and certainly it never entered his head that he himself had the temperament of the artist, detesting both high and low, and anxious only to be let alone to get on with his own work. Charlie was the upper class flinging itself into the struggle for justice on behalf of the oppressed; Charlie was Byron, determined to free the Greeks without having any clear notion of what or who the Greeks were; Charlie was a Grail knight of social justice.

Francis cared little what might happen to Charlie, but he grieved and brooded over Ismay. He had a strong intuition that Charlie was a bad influence, and the more he saw of Charlie at Buys-Bozzaris’s gambling sessions the stronger that intuition became. There were now too many regulars at the evening sessions for bridge, and the game had become poker; for poker Charlie had no aptitude at all. Not only was he a rash gambler; he delighted in the role of the rash gambler. He seemed almost to claw his chips toward him; he flung down his cards with an air of defiance; he took stupid risks—and lost. He did not pay, he gave IOUs which Buys-Bozzaris tucked in his waistcoat pocket almost as if he did not notice them. Francis knew quite enough of the grammar of money to know that an IOU is a very dangerous scrap of paper. Worst of all, on the rare occasions when Charlie won, he exulted in an unseemly way, as if by pillaging the Oxonians around him he was indicating the have-not class. Francis fretted about Charlie, without quite seeing that Charlie was a fool and a gull. For Charlie had something that looked like romantic sweep and dash, and these were qualities that Francis knew he lacked utterly.

He saw a lot of Ismay, for Ismay was drawn by the easy glasses of excellent sherry, the meals at the George, the visits to the cinema and the theatre that Francis could provide, and was eager to provide. Ismay was even willing to let Francis kiss her and paw her (paw was her expression when she was impatient and wanted him to stop) as a reasonable return for the luxuries he commanded. This gave Francis even deeper anxiety; if she allowed him such liberties, what did she permit to Charlie?

He was miserable, as only a worried lover can be, but his love had another and happier aspect. Ismay was willing to pose for drawings, and he did many sketches of her.

When he had completed a particularly good one she said:

“Oh, may I have that?”

“It’s not much more than a study. Let me try for a really good one.”

“No, this is terrific. Charlie would love it.”

Charlie did not love it. He was furious and tore it up, and made Ismay cry—she did not often cry—because he said he would not have that oaf Cornish looking at her in the way the sketch made it very clear that he did look at her—as a lover, an adorer.

Ismay, however, rather enjoyed Charlie’s pique, so much more fiery than Francis’s sluggish jealousy, disguised as concern, so stuffy and possessive. So things went further, and when one day Francis worked himself up to the pitch of asking Ismay if he might draw her in the nude, she consented. He was overjoyed, until she said, “But none of the old Artists-and-Models-in-Paris stuff, you understand?” which he thought reflected on his phlegmatic, objective artist’s attitude toward the unclothed figure. He admitted to himself that Ismay had a coarse streak—but that was part of her irresistible allurement. Coarse, like some splendid woman of the Renaissance aristocracy.