Fraternity.

“The heart,” he said, “is a dark well; its depth unknown. I have lived eighty years. I am still drawing water.”
“Draw a little for me, Dad.”

I found John Galsworthy’s 1906 book Fraternity via a book trail: One book mentioned another book which mentioned this book. I’ve had pretty good luck with book trails in the past; one of my best finds via a book trail was discovering Booth Tarkington by a mention of one of his novels in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise.

Fraternity itself is a quirky book, something of a satire of upper-middle-class attitudes towards the lower classes in turn-of-the-century England. The plot of the book revolves around the slow-burn relationship between Hilary, the emotionally estranged husband of Bianca, and a young model named Ivy who comes to pose for a portrait Bianca is painting. But the book itself is more concerned with the way that the extended family of which Hilary is a part views “those people” – the truly poor, but also simply the working classes, the less fortunate but not poor (like Ivy), and the riffraff who inhabit the parts of London where decent folk simply aren’t seen.

Galsworthy showcases a dry wit, sprinkling the novel with smart-assed rejoinders and silly names (the pious, loyal butler named Creed; the socialite named Mrs. Talents Smallpeace; the intimidating activist named Mary Daunt), and also treating the upper-class denizens of the book with just a touch of disdain for their snobbery. The story moves along quickly, in part because of copious amounts of dialogue – both real and imagined, as Galsworthy likes to describe facial expressions with quotes that explain what the person might be thinking – and also because of the various minor subplots among the various characters in Hilary and Bianca’s family. It’s a minor work of literature that for whatever reason seems to have been swept aside, perhaps because of the wave of more serious English novels that followed in the 1910s and 1920s.