The group of people making a stately progress down the wide, classically proportioned steps of Holcombe Hall resembled nothing so much as the bearers of a particularly fragile egg, in all probability one whose contents hovered precariously on the brink of extinction, and which must be delivered to its resting place with all the fuss and solicitude of members of the Royal Geographic Society whose reputations might be supposed to hang on the fate of the hatchling.