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'You always find excuses for everybody, Constanza,' said her mother. 'It's moral laxity.'

'Are you going to work for the tourists...Giorgio?'
'I am going to marry a rich women and race cars.'
'each will require a measure of skill,' said Constanza.

He wants a divorce to marry the woman he's having an affair with. But he also wants to have a career in politics &/or become a judge and so can't be seen as the guilty party in applying for a divorce, so she volunteers to have an affair so that she would be the guilty party. At this suggestion he becomes jealous 😂

'I always believed socialism would begin in the United States,' Constanza said. 'Certainly not in a backward agricultural country without political institutions. Karl Marx must be turning in his grave...'

' I shall leave Europe the day it's over (WWI ),' Simon said.
'Central America: Savage architecture & no present history.'
'Quite a lot of local history.'

For him there is the possibility of the tabula rasa, for her(& the author) there's no getting away from what went before

'Simon was not like that. I always thought Simon was different from anybody else.
'My dear, very few people are that,' said Mr James.
'Simon is one in a thousand. His mother wants us to have an English nanny; now you say he wants an English wife?'
"how fast you go, dear girl.'

There is a strangeness to this novel, not just because it is s comedy of manners - in the author's opinion, not because it has a character called Henry James who is not the Henry James, but still seems rather like him, possibly because in addition it is gender reversed novel with sexual and asexual themes, and catholicism...and horses

When the wet nurse from Castelfonte came fir him, Anna was displeased to see a new face. 'why can't we have the woman we had for Constanza?' She complained, ' she was satisfactory.'

- little realising that even working class women are not well managed milch cows 😂

Anna moved her lips: 'men are...vile.'
'men are men, signora principessa.'
'that is dreadful,' said Anna.

The tone and style of this remind me very much of Rose Macauley's - The World My Wilderness, published 1950 - a memorable book and one I enjoyed very much - reminds me to read more Macauley.