Both sisters lived in their father's,really their mother's,Kensington housemixed with the young Cambridge group,the group that stood for 'freedom'and flannel trousers,and flannel shirts open at the neck,and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy,and a whispering,murmuring sort of voice,and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.Hilda,however,suddenly married a man ten years older than herself,an elder member of the same Cambridge group,a man with a fair amount of money,and a comfortable family job in the government:he also wrote philosophical essays.She lived with him in a smallish house in Westminster,and moved in that good sort of society of people in the government who are not tip-toppers,but who are,or would be,the real intelligent power in the nation:people who know what they're talking about,or talk as if they did.
Connie did a mild form of war-work,and consorted with the flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigents,who gently mocked at everything,so far.Her 'friend'was a Clifford Chatterley,a young man of twenty-two,who had hurried home from Bonn,where he was studying the technicalities of coal-mining.He had previously spent two years at Cambridge.Now he had become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment,so he could mock at everything more becomingly in uniform.
Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie.Connie was well-to-do intelligentsia,but he was aristocracy.Not the big sort,but still it.
His father was a baronet,and his mother had been a viscount's daughter.
But Clifford,while he was better bred than Connie,and more 'society',was in his own way more provincial and more timid.He was at his ease in the narrow 'great world',that is,landed aristocracy society,but he was shy and nervous of all that other big world which consists of the vast hordes of the middle and lower classes,and foreigners.If the truth must be told,he was just a little bit frightened of middle-and lower-class humanity,and of foreigners not of his own class.He was,in some paralysing way,conscious of his own defencelessness,though he had all the defence of privilege.Which is curious,but a phenomenon of our day.
Therefore the peculiar soft assurance of a girl like Constance Reid fascinated him.She was so much more mistress of herself in that outer world of chaos than he was master of himself.
Nevertheless he too was a rebel:rebelling even against his class.Or perhaps rebel is too strong a word;far too strong.He was only caught in the general,popular recoil of the young against convention and against any sort of real authority.Fathers were ridiculous:his own obstinate one supremely so.And governments were ridiculous:our own wait-and-see sort especially so.And armies were ridiculous,and old buffers of generals altogether,the red-faced Kitchener supremely.Even the war was ridiculous,though it did kill rather a lot of people.
In fact everything was a little ridiculous,or very ridiculous:certainly everything connected with authority,whether it were in the army or the government or the universities,was ridiculous to a degree.And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to govern,they were ridiculous too.Sir Geoffrey,Clifford's father,was intensely ridiculous,chopping down his trees,and weeding men out of his colliery to shove them into the war;and himself being so safe and patriotic;but,also,spending more money on his country than he'd got.
When Miss Chatterley--Emma--came down to London from the Midlands to do some nursing work,she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir Geoffrey and his determined patriotism.Herbert,the elder brother and heir,laughed outright,though it was his trees that were falling for trench props.But Clifford only smiled a little uneasily.Everything was ridiculous,quite true.But when it came too close and oneself became ridiculous too...?
At least people of a different class,like Connie,were earnest about something.
They believed in something.