She had deliberately not shown Lord Ronald her manuscript before it went to the publishers.
He was such a good-humoured gentle person that she felt he might have protested against the picture she had drawn of his brother, even though there was no reason for him to defend any member of his family.
They had certainly treated him as if he was a pariah, an outcast and yet, although he often laughed about their various eccentricities, he had never been unkind.
“I cannot understand,” Tamara’s sister, Maïka, had once said to her, “how they could bear to lose Ronald. He is so charming, so kind and so sympathetic you would think that he must have left a great void in his family that no one else could fill.”
“They are stiff-necked, autocratic and altogether contemptible!” Tamara had answered, bu
