The Malcontents by C.P. Snow

The drawing-room in Thomas Freer's house was entirely in his taste. That wasn't because his wife was negligible; there she was, sitting among her guests, all present except Mark Robinson, who, she remarked equably, was not often late. She was a big strong-muscled woman, whose forehead, deeply lined, seemed out of harmony with the heavy body: it was easy to believe, if one looked only at the fine and delicate features, that she had once been beautiful. Now, despite the harassed skin, she seemed content, able to absent herself from trouble, amused by what had happened to her.

Her husband was the same age within a year and they had had Stephen, their only child, when they were in their thirties. But Thomas Freer looked younger than she did, and did not absent himself at all. In this company he was in command. It was a bourgeois gathering, and he liked it: the Bishop and his wife and daughter, his own wife and son and his son's cultivated friend, just arrived, with polite apologies. That was all, and as it should be. Thomas Freer was himself a bourgeois, but of an unusual kind: to himself he might have smothered the word patrician. His grandfather had been a prosperous solicitor in this town, and his father, and now himself. He could afford to let his partners do most of the firm's practice, and indulge himself as Registrar, the layman responsible for the cathedral's legal business. Like others of the few remaining old families in the town, his had started as Unitarians, but his father had moved into the Anglican church. That suited Thomas very well. He enjoyed a small society, he would have detested being taken out of it, he liked his own position. He liked being able to devote himself to causes already lost, such as Union Now and the local Liberal Party.