A family that is very bad at effectively loving each other, but considerably better at loving their country house, fumble through several linked emotional crises.
What, indeed, could be more delightful than this country-house life of Mr. Pendyce; its perfect cleanliness, its busy leisure, its combination of fresh air and scented warmth, its complete intellectual repose, its essential and professional aloofness from suffering of any kind, and its soup--emblematically and above all, its soup--made from the rich remains of pampered beasts?
Galsworthy is fairly straightforward about their merely human follies, but very, very slightly sarcastic about the follies of their class, so I could enjoy the real-estate fantasy without feeling like a total creep. ( is a better author, but I feel like a horrible member of a horrible species after reading her books. Possibly she's enough better that I act like a slightly better person, but I don't think the effect is significant.)
Historical oddities; an landholder calling himself a "Tory Communist" because he quite consciously wants a conservative nanny state; "there were liberals [in the village] now that they were beginning to believe that the ballot was really secret"; "The Rector blushed. He hated tale-bearing--that is, of course, in the case of a man; the case of a woman was different--and just as, when he went to Bellew he had been careful not to give George away, so now he was still more on his guard."
Project Gutenberg etext 2772
So wrote clew in
Fiction (19th c.).