This is a delightful, amusing, tender, sad, thoroughly enjoyable book. Thawle is the ancestral home of the de Boissy's and like the family, has declined and decayed somewhat since its glorious heyday. The only survivors of the family are Lady Evelyn, who is over 80 and her bachelor son Lord Guy. Poor Lord Guy is a bit of a Peter Pan and although now in his forties Mummy is still the centre of his life; he also collects feathers, rides a superannuated racehorse called Rolling Home and retains a strong attachment for his nursery rocking horse, Percy, and for an exquisite collection of Fabergé animals. Apart from Giles, a faithful retainer from the old days, the only other member of the Thawle household is Irene, a strange sad waif of a girl with masses of blonde hair which keeps coming adrift from the hairpins intended to hold it in position (I wonder why she is depicted on the dust jacket as a brunette?). She lives in the servant's quarters, wears Lady Evelyn 's long discarded Erté model clothes, and is governed by the mores of romantic novels by Elinor Glyn and others; the heroines of her life are Evangeline, Ambrosine