Corridors of Power by C.P. Snow

It was a warm summer night, a year and a half after Roger's resignation, when Margaret and I arrived at South Street for a party at Diana's. Not that either of us was thinking of the past. This was just an engagement, it wasn't more significant than others, it was part of the to-ing and fro-ing. The children were at school, we were free, it was pleasant to drive round the Park through the soft indigo evening.

In the drawing-room upstairs, the guests clattered and drank, keeping eyes alert for the latest entrant. There was a simmer of pleasure as they moved around, the pleasure of being inside the circle, like being in a party on ship-board, with the sea pattering below. It was all still going on, I thought. Going on as, for most of them, it had always been: and as, in their expectations, it always would.