Travelling with Chips in the 1920s (I have got to 1926) makes me appreciate the advantages of lockdown. He lives on a vapid, social merry go round.
Endless dinners, dances, balls, weekends in the country, Ascot, Goodwood, Cowes and up north to stalk occasionally. He has of course no insight into his condition. When he is not writing his diary he must be writing a whole lot of thank you letters. He despises his father for being a successful, meaning rich, businessman yet relies on him to pay for the jewels and bibelots Chips is so fond of. He has as much depth as the water mirror in Bordeaux, ‘tho he’d call it un miroir d’eau.
I’m not even a quarter way through the first of three volumes so maybe I will grow to like him better. I do admire his prodigious output, reminding me of a hoary story about Edward Gibbon.
The Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III, permitted Mr. Gibbon to present to him the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. When the second volume of that work appeared, it was quite in order that it should be presented to His Royal Highness in like manner. The prince received the author with much good nature and affability, saying to him, as he laid the quarto on the table. “Another d-mn’d thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?”