They were always taking up the wrong people
She even began to be aware of a growing liking for them, aliking inspired by the very characteristics that would once haveprovoked her disapproval. Susy had had plenty of training inliking common people with big purses; in such cases her stock ofallowances and extenuations was inexhaustible. But they had tobe successful common people; and the trouble was that theHickses, judged by her standards, were failures. It was notonly that they were ridiculous; so, heaven knew, were many oftheir rivals. But the Hickses were both ridiculous andunsuccessful. They had consistently resisted the efforts of theexperienced advisers who had first descried them on the horizonand tried to help them upward. They were always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrong kind of party, and spendingmillions on things that nobody who mattered cared about. Theyall believed passionately in "movements" and "causes" and"ideals," and were always attended by the exponents of theirlatest beliefs, always asking you to hear lectures by haggardwomen in peplums, and having their portraits painted by wildpeople who never turned out to be the fashion.
All this would formerly have increased Susy’s contempt; now shefound herself liking the Hickses most for their failings. Shewas touched by their simple good faith, their isolation in themidst of all their queer apostles and parasites, their way ofdrifting about an alien and indifferent world in a compactlyclinging group of which Eldorada Tooker, the doctor and the twosecretaries formed the outer fringe, and by their view ofthemselves as a kind of collective re-incarnation of some paststate of princely culture, symbolised for Mrs. Hicks in what shecalled "the court of the Renaissance." Eldorada, of course, wastheir chief prophetess; but even the intensely "bright" andmodern young secretaries, Mr. Beck and Mr. Buttles, showed atouching tendency to share her view, and spoke of Mr. Hicks as"promoting art," in the spirit of Pandolfino celebrating themunificence of the Medicis.
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