Before the dinner party at Meadowlands, Beth dresses carefully with help from her mother and sister Eleanor. Beth’s family admires how she looks, but Eleanor’s snide comments about the Wolfe family and Tessa’s earlier behavior remind Beth that she is entering a hostile environment. Beth also recalls that Gabriel recently impressed her family at supper, though their approval of him remained limited.

When Beth arrives at Meadowlands, the dinner has already begun and Tessa immediately embarrasses her by claiming the meal had to start without her. Beth is seated with the visiting Scott family from California: film producer Richard Scott, his wife Moira, and their beautiful daughter Louisa, who has just finished her first year at Oxford. Beth quickly notices how glamorous Louisa is and how intently Gabriel is talking to her, and Beth realizes with sudden dread that Gabriel and Louisa are likely to grow close and that Beth will feel shut out of Gabriel’s world.

Richard Scott engages Beth in serious conversation, asking about her family, politics, books, music, and the execution of Ruth Ellis. Beth appreciates being treated like an adult, but even while talking to Richard, she keeps watching Gabriel and Louisa. The evening then shifts when Louisa tells her father that Gabriel is writing a novel. Richard offers to have the manuscript read, and Gabriel confidently explains that it is an “upside-down love story” about a woman who refuses conventional marriage and sexual restraint, revealing both his ambition and his ease in this sophisticated circle.

Tessa then turns the discussion into an attack on Beth, implying that Gabriel’s heroine is based on her and pressing Beth about whether she would reject a great marriage. Beth avoids open conflict, but Gabriel does not defend her, which sharpens Beth’s sense that he will not challenge his mother when it matters. Later, when Tessa takes Beth into the kitchen under the pretense of fetching pudding, Tessa praises Louisa as Gabriel’s type and cruelly warns Beth that boys like Gabriel do not end up with girls like her. By the end of the evening, Tessa’s class-laden insults leave Beth unable to stop imagining Gabriel and Louisa as a perfectly matched pair and fearing that her relationship with Gabriel is temporary and unequal.