The Big Drum

The grate is banked with flowers, the street outside bright with sun—and Philip Mackworth has just learned that the one guest he cannot face is coming to lunch. His friend has no intention of letting him escape.

In a polished South Audley Street flat, amid luncheon silver and Society gossip, Robert Roope hopes to reunite Philip, a novelist who shuns publicity, with Ottoline de Chaumié, the widow he loved ten years ago. Their parting began when Ottoline asked him to promote her family in his newspaper letters; Philip refused, and he still despises the age’s appetite for display—and Roope’s cheerful talent for arranging it. Now Ottoline is back in London, with rival suitors including a baronet who cures bacon on a grand scale. Can old feeling survive the big drum of social ambition?

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