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The attraction was mutual, but it concealed a core of misunderstanding. Bryan saw in Diana a fresh, unspoilt girl, excellently educated, bright without at that stage seeming too sharp, and stunningly beautiful. The surface pleasantness of society already palled on him; he spotted the cynicism underneath. One of his poems, ‘The Party’, starts: ‘Here friendship founders in a sea of friends,/And harsh-lipp’d bubbly cannot make amends.’ Diana seemed not to belong to this morally empty world; she was a country girl. If her vision of their future approximated to scenes from Aldous Huxley, his derived from Tolstoy. He was a Levin seeking his Kitty; though he was, of course, himself conscious of no such consideration, but simply fell in love.
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