Marriage by H. G. Wells

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CHAPTER THE FIRST

A DAY WITH THE POPES

Sec. 1

An extremely pretty girl occupied a second-class compartment in one of
those trains which percolate through the rural tranquillities of middle
England from Ganford in Oxfordshire to Rumbold Junction in Kent. She was
going to join her family at Buryhamstreet after a visit to some
Gloucestershire friends. Her father, Mr. Pope, once a leader in the
coach-building world and now by retirement a gentleman, had taken the
Buryhamstreet vicarage furnished for two months (beginning on the
fifteenth of July) at his maximum summer rental of seven guineas a week.
His daughter was on her way to this retreat.

At first she had been an animated traveller, erect and keenly regardful
of every detail upon the platforms of the stations at which her
conveyance lingered, but the tedium of the journey and the warmth of the
sunny afternoon had relaxed her pose by imperceptible degrees, and she
sat now comfortably in the corner, with her neat toes upon the seat
before her, ready to drop them primly at the first sign of a
fellow-traveller. Her expression lapsed more and more towards an almost
somnolent reverie. She wished she had not taken a second-class ticket,
because then she might have afforded a cup of tea at Reading, and so
fortified herself against this insinuating indolence.

She was travelling second class, instead of third as she ought to have
done, through one of those lapses so inevitable to young people in her
position. The two Carmel boys and a cousin, two greyhounds and a chow
had come to see her off; they had made a brilliant and prosperous group
on the platform and extorted the manifest admiration of two youthful
porters, and it had been altogether too much for Marjorie Pope to admit
it was the family custom--except when her father's nerves had to be
considered--to go third class. So she had made a hasty calculation--she
knew her balance to a penny because of the recent tipping--and found it
would just run to it. Fourpence remained,--and there would be a porter
at Buryhamstreet!

Her mother had said: "You will have Ample." Well, opinions of amplitude
vary. With numerous details fresh in her mind, Marjorie decided it would
be wiser to avoid financial discussion during her first few days at
Buryhamstreet.

There was much in Marjorie's equipment in the key of travelling second
class at the sacrifice of afternoon tea. There was, for example, a
certain quiet goodness of style about her clothes, though the skirt
betrayed age, and an entire absence of style about her luggage, which
was all in the compartment with her, and which consisted of a distended
hold-all, a very good tennis racquet in a stretcher, a portmanteau of
cheap white basketwork held together by straps, and a very new,
expensive-looking and meretricious dressing-bag of imitation morocco,
which had been one of her chief financial errors at Oxbridge. The
collection was eloquent indeed of incompatible standards....

Marjorie had a chin that was small in size if resolute in form, and a
mouth that was not noticeably soft and weak because it was conspicuously
soft and pretty. Her nose was delicately aquiline and very subtly and
finely modelled, and she looked out upon the world with steady,
grey-blue eyes beneath broad, level brows that contradicted in a large
measure the hint of weakness below. She had an abundance of copper-red
hair, which flowed back very prettily from her broad, low forehead and
over her delicate ears, and she had that warm-tinted clear skin that
goes so well with reddish hair. She had a very dainty neck, and the long
slender lines of her body were full of the promise of a riper beauty.
She had the good open shoulders of a tennis-player and a swimmer. Some
day she was to be a tall, ruddy, beautiful woman. She wore simple
clothes of silvery grey and soft green, and about her waist was a belt
of grey leather in which there now wilted two creamy-petalled roses.

That was the visible Marjorie. Somewhere out of time and space was an
invisible Marjorie who looked out on the world with those steady eyes,
and smiled or drooped with the soft red lips, and dreamt, and wondered,
and desired.

Sec. 2

What a queer thing the invisible human being would appear if, by some
discovery as yet inconceivable, some spiritual X-ray photography, we
could flash it into sight! Long ago I read a book called "Soul Shapes"
that was full of ingenious ideas, but I doubt very much if the thing so
revealed would have any shape, any abiding solid outline at all. It is
something more fluctuating and discursive than that--at any rate, for
every one young enough not to have set and hardened. Things come into
it and become it, things drift out of it and cease to be it, things turn
upside down in it and change and colour and dissolve, and grow and eddy
about and blend into each other. One might figure it, I suppose, as a
preposterous jumble animated by a will; a floundering disconnectedness
through which an old hump of impulse rises and thrusts unaccountably; a
river beast of purpose wallowing in a back eddy of mud and weeds and
floating objects and creatures drowned. Now the sunshine of gladness
makes it all vivid, now it is sombre and grimly insistent under the sky
of some darkling mood, now an emotional gale sweeps across it and it is
one confused agitation....

And surely these invisible selves of men were never so jumbled, so
crowded, complicated, and stirred about as they are at the present time.
Once I am told they had a sort of order, were sphered in religious
beliefs, crystal clear, were arranged in a cosmogony that fitted them as
hand fits glove, were separated by definite standards of right and wrong
which presented life as planned in all its essential aspects from the
cradle to the grave. Things are so no longer. That sphere is broken for
most of us; even if it is tied about and mended again, it is burst like
a seed case; things have fallen out and things have fallen in....

Can I convey in any measure how it was with Marjorie?

What was her religion?

In college forms and returns, and suchlike documents, she would describe
herself as "Church of England." She had been baptized according to the
usages of that body, but she had hitherto evaded confirmation into it,
and although it is a large, wealthy, and powerful organization with
many minds to serve it, it had never succeeded in getting into her quick
and apprehensive intelligence any lucid and persuasive conception of
what it considered God and the universe were up to with her. It had
failed to catch her attention and state itself to her. A number of
humorous and other writers and the general trend of talk around her, and
perhaps her own shrewd little observation of superficial things, had, on
the other hand, created a fairly definite belief in her that it wasn't
as a matter of fact up to very much at all, that what it said wasn't
said with that absolute honesty which is a logical necessity in every
religious authority, and that its hierarchy had all sorts of political
and social considerations confusing its treatment of her immortal
soul....

Marjorie followed her father in abstaining from church. He too professed
himself "Church of England," but he was, if we are to set aside merely
superficial classifications, an irascible atheist with a respect for
usage and Good Taste, and an abject fear of the disapproval of other
gentlemen of his class. For the rest he secretly disliked clergymen on
account of the peculiarity of their collars, and a certain influence
they had with women. When Marjorie at the age of fourteen had displayed
a hankering after ecclesiastical ceremony and emotional religion, he had
declared: "We don't want any of _that_ nonsense," and sent her into the
country to a farm where there were young calves and a bottle-fed lamb
and kittens. At times her mother went to church and displayed
considerable orthodoxy and punctilio, at times the good lady didn't, and
at times she thought in a broad-minded way that there was a Lot in
Christian Science, and subjected herself to the ministrations of an
American named Silas Root. But his ministrations were too expensive for
continuous use, and so the old faith did not lose its hold upon the
family altogether.

       *       *       *       *       *

At school Marjorie had been taught what I may best describe as Muffled
Christianity--a temperate and discreet system designed primarily not to
irritate parents, in which the painful symbol of the crucifixion and the
riddle of what Salvation was to save her from, and, indeed, the coarser
aspects of religion generally, were entirely subordinate to images of
amiable perambulations, and a rich mist of finer feelings. She had been
shielded, not only from arguments against her religion, but from
arguments for it--the two things go together--and I do not think it was
particularly her fault if she was now growing up like the great majority
of respectable English people, with her religious faculty as it were,
artificially faded, and an acquired disposition to regard any
speculation of why she was, and whence and whither, as rather foolish,
not very important, and in the very worst possible taste.

And so, the crystal globe being broken which once held souls together,
you may expect to find her a little dispersed and inconsistent in her
motives, and with none of that assurance a simpler age possessed of the
exact specification of goodness or badness, the exact delimitation of
right and wrong. Indeed, she did not live in a world of right and wrong,
or anything so stern; "horrid" and "jolly" had replaced these archaic
orientations. In a world where a mercantile gentility has conquered
passion and God is neither blasphemed nor adored, there necessarily
arises this generation of young people, a little perplexed, indeed, and
with a sense of something missing, but feeling their way inevitably at
last to the great releasing question, "Then why shouldn't we have a
good time?"

Yet there was something in Marjorie, as in most human beings, that
demanded some general idea, some aim, to hold her life together. A girl
upon the borders of her set at college was fond of the phrase "living
for the moment," and Marjorie associated with it the speaker's lax
mouth, sloe-like eyes, soft, quick-flushing, boneless face, and a habit
of squawking and bouncing in a forced and graceless manner. Marjorie's
natural disposition was to deal with life in a steadier spirit than
that. Yet all sorts of powers and forces were at work in her, some
exalted, some elvish, some vulgar, some subtle. She felt keenly and
desired strongly, and in effect she came perhaps nearer the realization
of that offending phrase than its original exponent. She had a clean
intensity of feeling that made her delight in a thousand various things,
in sunlight and textures, and the vividly quick acts of animals, in
landscape, and the beauty of other girls, in wit, and people's voices,
and good strong reasoning, and the desire and skill of art. She had a
clear, rapid memory that made her excel perhaps a little too easily at
school and college, an eagerness of sympathetic interest that won people
very quickly and led to disappointments, and a very strong sense of the
primary importance of Miss Marjorie Pope in the world. And when any very
definite dream of what she would like to be and what she would like to
do, such as being the principal of a ladies' college, or the first woman
member of Parliament, or the wife of a barbaric chief in Borneo, or a
great explorer, or the wife of a millionaire and a great social leader,
or George Sand, or Saint Teresa, had had possession of her imagination
for a few weeks, an entirely contrasted and equally attractive dream
would presently arise beside it and compete with it and replace it. It
wasn't so much that she turned against the old one as that she was
attracted by the new, and she forgot the old dream rather than abandoned
it, simply because she was only one person, and hadn't therefore the
possibility of realizing both.

In certain types Marjorie's impressionability aroused a passion of
proselytism. People of the most diverse kinds sought to influence her,
and they invariably did so. Quite a number of people, including her
mother and the principal of her college, believed themselves to be the
leading influence in her life. And this was particularly the case with
her aunt Plessington. Her aunt Plessington was devoted to social and
political work of an austere and aggressive sort (in which Mr.
Plessington participated); she was childless, and had a Movement of her
own, the Good Habits Movement, a progressive movement of the utmost
scope and benevolence which aimed at extensive interferences with the
food and domestic intimacies of the more defenceless lower classes by
means ultimately of legislation, and she had Marjorie up to see her,
took her for long walks while she influenced with earnestness and
vigour, and at times had an air of bequeathing her mantle, movement and
everything, quite definitely to her "little Madge." She spoke of
training her niece to succeed her, and bought all the novels of Mrs.
Humphry Ward for her as they appeared, in the hope of quickening in her
that flame of politico-social ambition, that insatiable craving for
dinner-parties with important guests, which is so distinctive of the
more influential variety of English womanhood. It was due rather to her
own habit of monologue than to any reserve on the part of Marjorie that
she entertained the belief that her niece was entirely acquiescent in
these projects. They went into Marjorie's mind and passed. For nearly a
week, it is true, she had dramatized herself as the angel and
inspiration of some great modern statesman, but this had been ousted by
a far more insistent dream, begotten by a picture she had seen in some
exhibition, of a life of careless savagery, whose central and constantly
recurrent incident was the riding of barebacked horses out of
deep-shadowed forest into a foamy sunlit sea--in a costume that would
certainly have struck Aunt Plessington as a mistake.

If you could have seen Marjorie in her railway compartment, with the
sunshine, sunshine mottled by the dirty window, tangled in her hair and
creeping to and fro over her face as the train followed the curves of
the line, you would certainly have agreed with me that she was pretty,
and you might even have thought her beautiful. But it was necessary to
fall in love with Marjorie before you could find her absolutely
beautiful. You might have speculated just what business was going on
behind those drowsily thoughtful eyes. If you are--as people
say--"Victorian," you might even have whispered "Day Dreams," at the
sight of her....

She _was_ dreaming, and in a sense she was thinking of beautiful things.
But only mediately. She was thinking how very much she would enjoy
spending freely and vigorously, quite a considerable amount of
money,--heaps of money.

You see, the Carmels, with whom she had just been staying, were
shockingly well off. They had two motor cars with them in the country,
and the boys had the use of the second one as though it was just an old
bicycle. Marjorie had had a cheap white dinner-dress, made the year
before by a Chelsea French girl, a happy find of her mother's, and it
was shapely and simple and not at all bad, and she had worn her green
beads and her Egyptian necklace of jade; but Kitty Carmel and her sister
had had a new costume nearly every night, and pretty bracelets, and
rubies, big pearls, and woven gold, and half a score of delightful and
precious things for neck and hair. Everything in the place was bright
and good and abundant, the servants were easy and well-mannered, without
a trace of hurry or resentment, and one didn't have to be sharp about
the eggs and things at breakfast in the morning, or go without. All
through the day, and even when they had gone to bathe from the smart
little white and green shed on the upper lake, Marjorie had been made to
feel the insufficiency of her equipment. Kitty Carmel, being twenty-one,
possessed her own cheque-book and had accounts running at half a dozen
West-end shops; and both sisters had furnished their own rooms according
to their taste, with a sense of obvious effect that had set Marjorie
speculating just how a room might be done by a girl with a real eye for
colour and a real brain behind it....

The train slowed down for the seventeenth time. Marjorie looked up and
read "Buryhamstreet."

Sec. 3

Her reverie vanished, and by a complex but almost instantaneous movement
she had her basket off the rack and the carriage door open. She became
teeming anticipations. There, advancing in a string, were Daffy, her
elder sister, Theodore, her younger brother, and the dog Toupee. Sydney
and Rom hadn't come. Daffy was not copper red like her sister, but
really quite coarsely red-haired; she was bigger than Marjorie, and with
irregular teeth instead of Marjorie's neat row; she confessed them in a
broad simple smile of welcome. Theodore was hatless, rustily
fuzzy-headed, and now a wealth of quasi-humorous gesture. The dog Toupee
was straining at a leash, and doing its best in a yapping, confused
manner, to welcome the wrong people by getting its lead round their
legs.

"Toupee!" cried Marjorie, waving the basket. "Toupee!"

They all called it Toupee because it was like one, but the name was
forbidden in her father's hearing. Her father had decided that the
proper name for a family dog in England is Towser, and did his utmost to
suppress a sobriquet that was at once unprecedented and not in the best
possible taste. Which was why the whole family, with the exception of
Mrs. Pope, of course, stuck to Toupee....

Marjorie flashed a second's contrast with the Carmel splendours.

"Hullo, old Daffy. What's it like?" she asked, handing out the basket as
her sister came up.

"It's a lark," said Daffy. "Where's the dressing-bag?"

"Thoddy," said Marjorie, following up the dressing-bag with the
hold-all. "Lend a hand."

"Stow it, Toupee," said Theodore, and caught the hold-all in time.

In another moment Marjorie was out of the train, had done the swift
kissing proper to the occasion, and rolled a hand over Toupee's
head--Toupee, who, after a passionate lunge at a particularly savoury
drover from the next compartment, was now frantically trying to indicate
that Marjorie was the one human being he had ever cared for. Brother and
sister were both sketching out the state of affairs at Buryhamstreet
Vicarage in rapid competitive jerks, each eager to tell things
first--and the whole party moved confusedly towards the station exit.
Things pelted into Marjorie's mind.

"We've got an old donkey-cart. I thought we shouldn't get here--ever....
Madge, we can go up the church tower whenever we like, only old Daffy
won't let me shin up the flagstaff. It's _perfectly_ safe--you couldn't
fall off if you tried.... Had positively to get out at the level
crossing and _pull_ him over.... There's a sort of moat in the
garden.... You never saw such furniture, Madge! And the study! It's hung
with texts, and stuffed with books about the Scarlet Woman.... Piano's
rather good, it's a Broadwood.... The Dad's got a war on about the
tennis net. Oh, frightful! You'll see. It won't keep up. He's had a
letter kept waiting by the _Times_ for a fortnight, and it's a terror at
breakfast. Says the motor people have used influence to silence him.
Says that's a game two can play at.... Old Sid got herself upset
stuffing windfalls. Rather a sell for old Sid, considering how refined
she's getting...."

There was a brief lull as the party got into the waiting governess cart.
Toupee, after a preliminary refusal to enter, made a determined attempt
on the best seat, from which he would be able to bark in a persistent,
official manner at anything that passed. That suppressed, and Theodore's
proposal to drive refused, they were able to start, and attention was
concentrated upon Daffy's negotiation of the station approach. Marjorie
turned on her brother with a smile of warm affection.

"How are you, old Theodore?"

"I'm all right, old Madge."

"Mummy?"

"Every one's all right," said Theodore; "if it wasn't for that damned
infernal net----"

"Ssssh!" cried both sisters together.

"_He_ says it," said Theodore.

Both sisters conveyed a grave and relentless disapproval.

"Pretty bit of road," said Marjorie. "I like that little house at the
corner."

A pause and the eyes of the sisters met.

"_He's_ here," said Daffy.

Marjorie affected ignorance.

"Who's here?"

"_Il vostro senior Miraculoso_."

"Just as though a fellow couldn't understand your kiddy little Italian,"
said Theodore, pulling Toupee's ear.

"Oh well, I thought he might be," said Marjorie, regardless of her
brother.

"Oh!" said Daffy. "I didn't know----"

Both sisters looked at each other, and then both glanced at Theodore. He
met Marjorie's eyes with a grimace of profound solemnity.

"Little brothers," he said, "shouldn't know. Just as though they didn't!
Rot! But let's change the subject, my dears, all the same. Lemme see.
There are a new sort of flea on Toupee, Madge, that he gets from the
hens."

"_Is_ a new sort," corrected Daffy. "He's horrider than ever, Madge. He
leaves his soap in soak now to make us think he has used it. This is the
village High Street. Isn't it jolly?"

"Corners don't _bite_ people," said Theodore, with a critical eye to the
driving.

Marjorie surveyed the High Street, while Daffy devoted a few moments to
Theodore.

The particular success of the village was its brace of chestnut trees
which, with that noble disregard of triteness which is one of the charms
of villages the whole world over, shadowed the village smithy. On either
side of the roadway between it and the paths was a careless width of
vivid grass protected by white posts, which gave way to admit a generous
access on either hand to a jolly public house, leering over red blinds,
and swinging a painted sign against its competitor. Several of the
cottages had real thatch and most had porches; they had creepers nailed
to their faces, and their gardens, crowded now with flowers, marigolds,
begonias, snapdragon, delphiniums, white foxgloves, and monkshood,
seemed almost too good to be true. The doctor's house was pleasantly
Georgian, and the village shop, which was also a post and telegraph
office, lay back with a slight air of repletion, keeping its bulging
double shop-windows wide open in a manifest attempt not to fall asleep.
Two score of shock-headed boys and pinafored girls were drilling upon a
bald space of ground before the village school, and near by, the
national emotion at the ever-memorable Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria
had evoked an artistic drinking-fountain of grey stone. Beyond the
subsequent green--there were the correctest geese thereon--the village
narrowed almost to a normal road again, and then, recalling itself with
a start, lifted a little to the churchyard wall about the grey and ample
church. "It's just like all the villages that ever were," said Marjorie,
and gave a cry of delight when Daffy, pointing to the white gate between
two elm trees that led to the vicarage, remarked: "That's us."

In confirmation of which statement, Sydney and Rom, the two sisters next
in succession to Marjorie, and with a strong tendency to be twins in
spite of the year between them, appeared in a state of vociferous
incivility opening the way for the donkey-carriage. Sydney was Sydney,
and Rom was just short for Romola--one of her mother's favourite
heroines in fiction.

"Old Madge," they said; and then throwing respect to the winds, "Old
Gargoo!" which was Marjorie's forbidden nickname, and short for gargoyle
(though surely only Victorian Gothic, ever produced a gargoyle that had
the remotest right to be associated with the neat brightness of
Marjorie's face).

She overlooked the offence, and the pseudo-twins boarded the cart from
behind, whereupon the already overburthened donkey, being old and in a
manner wise, quickened his pace for the house to get the whole thing
over.

"It's really an avenue," said Daffy; but Marjorie, with her mind strung
up to the Carmel standards, couldn't agree. It was like calling a row of
boy-scouts Potsdam grenadiers. The trees were at irregular distances, of
various ages, and mostly on one side. Still it was a shady, pleasant
approach.

And the vicarage was truly very interesting and amusing. To these
Londoners accustomed to live in a state of compression, elbows
practically touching, in a tall, narrow fore-and-aft stucco house, all
window and staircase, in a despondent Brompton square, there was an
effect of maundering freedom about the place, of enlargement almost to
the pitch of adventure and sunlight to the pitch of intoxication. The
house itself was long and low, as if a London house holidaying in the
country had flung itself asprawl; it had two disconnected and roomy
staircases, and when it had exhausted itself completely as a house, it
turned to the right and began again as rambling, empty stables, coach
house, cart sheds, men's bedrooms up ladders, and outhouses of the most
various kinds. On one hand was a neglected orchard, in the front of the
house was a bald, worried-looking lawn area capable of simultaneous
tennis and croquet, and at the other side a copious and confused
vegetable and flower garden full of roses, honesty, hollyhocks, and
suchlike herbaceous biennials and perennials, lapsed at last into
shrubbery, where a sickle-shaped, weedy lagoon of uncertain aims, which
had evidently, as a rustic bridge and a weeping willow confessed,
aspired to be an "ornamental water," declined at last to ducks. And
there was access to the church, and the key of the church tower, and one
went across the corner of the lawn, and by a little iron gate into the
churchyard to decipher inscriptions, as if the tombs of all
Buryhamstreet were no more than a part of the accommodation relinquished
by the vicar's household.

Marjorie was hurried over the chief points of all this at a breakneck
pace by Sydney and Rom, and when Sydney was called away to the horrors
of practice--for Sydney in spite of considerable reluctance was destined
by her father to be "the musical one"--Rom developed a copious
affection, due apparently to some occult aesthetic influence in
Marjorie's silvery-grey and green, and led her into the unlocked vestry,
and there prayed in a whisper that she might be given "one good hug,
just _one_"--and so they came out with their arms about each other very
affectionately to visit the lagoon again. And then Rom remembered that
Marjorie hadn't seen either the walnut-tree in the orchard, or the hen
with nine chicks....

Somewhere among all these interests came tea and Mrs. Pope.

Mrs. Pope kissed her daughter with an air of having really wanted to
kiss her half an hour ago, but of having been distracted since. She was
a fine-featured, anxious-looking little woman, with a close resemblance
to all her children, in spite of the fact that they were markedly
dissimilar one to the other, except only that they took their ruddy
colourings from their father. She was dressed in a neat blue dress that
had perhaps been hurriedly chosen, and her method of doing her hair was
a manifest compromise between duty and pleasure. She embarked at once
upon an exposition of the bedroom arrangements, which evidently involved
difficult issues. Marjorie was to share a room with Daffy--that was the
gist of it--as the only other available apartment, originally promised
to Marjorie, had been secured by Mr. Pope for what he called his
"matutinal ablutions, _videlicet_ tub."

"Then, when your Aunt Plessington comes, you won't have to move," said
Mrs. Pope with an air of a special concession. "Your father's looking
forward to seeing you, but he mustn't be disturbed just yet. He's in the
vicar's study. He's had his tea in there. He's writing a letter to the
_Times_ answering something they said in a leader, and also a private
note calling attention to their delay in printing his previous
communication, and he wants to be delicately ironical without being in
any way offensive. He wants to hint without actually threatening that
very probably he will go over to the _Spectator_ altogether if they do
not become more attentive. The _Times_ used to print his letters
punctually, but latterly these automobile people seem to have got hold
of it.... He has the window on the lawn open, so that I think, perhaps,
we'd better not stay out here--for fear our voices might disturb him."

"Better get right round the other side of the church," said Daffy.

"He'd hear far less of us if we went indoors," said Mrs. Pope.

Sec. 4

The vicarage seemed tight packed with human interest for Marjorie and
her mother and sisters. Going over houses is one of the amusements
proper to her sex, and she and all three sisters and her mother, as soon
as they had finished an inaudible tea, went to see the bedroom she was
to share with Daffy, and then examined, carefully and in order, the
furniture and decoration of the other bedrooms, went through the rooms
downstairs, always excepting and avoiding very carefully and closing as
many doors as possible on, and hushing their voices whenever they
approached the study in which her father was being delicately ironical
without being offensive to the _Times_. None of them had seen any of the
vicarage people at all--Mr. Pope had come on a bicycle and managed all
the negotiations--and it was curious to speculate about the individuals
whose personalities pervaded the worn and faded furnishings of the
place.

The Popes' keen-eyed inspection came at times, I think, dangerously near
prying. The ideals of decoration and interests of the vanished family
were so absolutely dissimilar to the London standards as to arouse a
sort of astonished wonder in their minds. Some of the things they
decided were perfectly hideous, some quaint, some were simply and weakly
silly. Everything was different from Hartstone Square. Daffy was perhaps
more inclined to contempt, and Mrs. Pope to refined amusement and witty
appreciation than Marjorie. Marjorie felt there was something in these
people that she didn't begin to understand, she needed some missing
clue that would unlock the secret of their confused peculiarity. She was
one of those people who have an almost instinctive turn for decoration
in costume and furniture; she had already had a taste of how to do
things in arranging her rooms at Bennett College, Oxbridge, where also
she was in great demand among the richer girls as an adviser. She knew
what it was to try and fail as well as to try and succeed, and these
people, she felt, hadn't tried for anything she comprehended. She
couldn't quite see why it was that there was at the same time an attempt
at ornament and a disregard of beauty, she couldn't quite do as her
mother did and dismiss it as an absurdity and have done with it. She
couldn't understand, too, why everything should be as if it were faded
and weakened from something originally bright and clear.

All the rooms were thick with queer little objects that indicated a
quite beaver-like industry in the production of "work." There were
embroidered covers for nearly every article on the wash-hand-stand, and
mats of wool and crochet wherever anything stood on anything; there were
"tidies" everywhere, and odd little brackets covered with gilded and
varnished fir cones and bearing framed photographs and little jars and
all sorts of colourless, dusty little objects, and everywhere on the
walls tacks sustained crossed fans with badly painted flowers or
transfer pictures. There was a jar on the bedroom mantel covered with
varnished postage stamps and containing grey-haired dried grasses. There
seemed to be a moral element in all this, for in the room Sydney shared
with Rom there was a decorative piece of lettering which declared that--

    "Something attempted, something done,
    Has earned a night's repose."

There were a great number of texts that set Marjorie's mind stirring
dimly with intimations of a missed significance. Over her own bed,
within the lattice of an Oxford frame, was the photograph of a picture
of an extremely composed young woman in a trailing robe, clinging to the
Rock of Ages in the midst of histrionically aggressive waves, and she
had a feeling, rather than a thought, that perhaps for all the oddity of
the presentation it did convey something acutely desirable, that she
herself had had moods when she would have found something very
comforting in just such an impassioned grip. And on a framed,
floriferous card, these incomprehensible words:

    |================================|
    |THY GRACE IS SUFFICIENT FOR ME. |
    |================================|

seemed to be saying something to her tantalizingly just outside her
range of apprehension.

Did all these things light up somehow to those dispossessed people--from
some angle she didn't attain? Were they living and moving realities when
those others were at home again?

The drawing-room had no texts; it was altogether more pretentious and
less haunted by the faint and faded flavour of religion that pervaded
the bedrooms. It had, however, evidences of travel in Switzerland and
the Mediterranean. There was a piano in black and gold, a little out of
tune, and surmounted by a Benares brass jar, enveloping a scarlet
geranium in a pot. There was a Japanese screen of gold wrought upon
black, that screened nothing. There was a framed chromo-lithograph of
Jerusalem hot in the sunset, and another of Jerusalem cold under a
sub-tropical moon, and there were gourds, roses of Jericho, sandalwood
rosaries and kindred trash from the Holy Land in no little profusion
upon a what-not. Such books as the room had contained had been arranged
as symmetrically as possible about a large, pink-shaded lamp upon the
claret- cloth of a round table, and were to be replaced, Mrs.
Pope said, at their departure. At present they were piled on a
side-table. The girls had been through them all, and were ready with the
choicer morsels for Marjorie's amusement. There was "Black Beauty," the
sympathetic story of a soundly Anglican horse, and a large Bible
extra-illustrated with photographs of every well-known scriptural
picture from Michael Angelo to Dore, and a book of injunctions to young
ladies upon their behaviour and deportment that Rom and Sydney found
particularly entertaining. Marjorie discovered that Sydney had picked up
a new favourite phrase. "I'm afraid we're all dreadfully cynical," said
Sydney, several times.

A more advanced note was struck by a copy of "Aurora Leigh," richly
underlined in pencil, but with exclamation marks at some of the bolder
passages....

And presently, still avoiding the open study window very elaborately,
this little group of twentieth century people went again into the
church--the church whose foundations were laid in A.D. 912--foundations
of rubble and cement that included flat Roman bricks from a still
remoter basilica. Their voices dropped instinctively, as they came into
its shaded quiet from the exterior sunshine. Marjorie went a little
apart and sat in a pew that gave her a glimpse of the one good
stained-glass window. Rom followed her, and perceiving her mood to be
restful, sat a yard away. Syd began a whispered dispute with her mother
whether it wasn't possible to try the organ, and whether Theodore might
not be bribed to blow. Daffy discovered relics of a lepers' squint and a
holy-water stoup, and then went to scrutinize the lettering of the ten
commandments of the Mosaic law that shone black and red on gold on
either side of the I.H.S. monogram behind the white-clothed communion
table that had once been the altar. Upon a notice board hung about the
waist of the portly pulpit were the numbers of hymns that had been sung
three days ago. The sound Protestantism of the vicar had banished
superfluous crosses from the building; the Bible reposed upon the wings
of a great brass eagle; shining blue and crimson in the window, Saint
Christopher carried his Lord. What a harmonized synthesis of conflicts a
country church presents! What invisible mysteries of filiation spread
between these ancient ornaments and symbols and the new young minds from
the whirlpool of the town that looked upon them now with such bright,
keen eyes, wondering a little, feeling a little, missing so much?

It was all so very cool and quiet now--with something of the immobile
serenity of death.

Sec. 5

When Mr. Pope had finished his letter to the _Times_, he got out of the
window of the study, treading on a flower-bed as he did so--he was the
sort of man who treads on flower-beds--partly with the purpose of
reading his composition aloud to as many members of his family as he
could assemble for the purpose, and so giving them a chance of
appreciating the nuances of his irony more fully than if they saw it
just in cold print without the advantage of his intonation, and partly
with the belated idea of welcoming Marjorie. The law presented a rather
discouraging desolation. Then he became aware that the church tower
frothed with his daughters. In view of his need of an audience, he
decided after a brief doubt that their presence there was
unobjectionable, and waved his MS. amiably. Marjorie flapped a
handkerchief in reply....

The subsequent hour was just the sort of hour that gave Mr. Pope an
almost meteorological importance to his family. He began with an
amiability that had no fault, except, perhaps, that it was a little
forced after the epistolary strain in the study, and his welcome to
Marjorie was more than cordial. "Well, little Madge-cat!" he said,
giving her an affectionate but sound and heavy thump on the left
shoulder-blade, "got a kiss for the old daddy?"

Marjorie submitted a cheek.

"That's right," said Mr. Pope; "and now I just want you all to advise
me----"

He led the way to a group of wicker garden chairs. "You're coming,
mummy?" he said, and seated himself comfortably and drew out a spectacle
case, while his family grouped itself dutifully. It made a charming
little picture of a Man and his Womankind. "I don't often flatter
myself," he said, "but this time I think I've been neat--neat's the word
for it."

He cleared his throat, put on his spectacles, and emitted a long, flat
preliminary note, rather like the sound of a child's trumpet. "Er--'Dear
Sir!'"

"Rom," said Mrs. Pope, "don't creak your chair."

"It's Daffy, mother," said Rom.

"Oh, _Rom!_" said Daffy.

Mr. Pope paused, and looked with a warning eye over his left
spectacle-glass at Rom.

"Don't creak your chair, Rom," he said, "when your mother tells you."

"I was _not_ creaking my chair," said Rom.

"I heard it," said Mr. Pope, suavely.

"It was Daffy."

"Your mother does not think so," said Mr. Pope.

"Oh, all right! I'll sit on the ground," said Rom, crimson to the roots
of her hair.

"Me too," said Daffy. "I'd rather."

Mr. Pope watched the transfer gravely. Then he readjusted his glasses,
cleared his throat again, trumpeted, and began. "Er--'Dear Sir,'"

"Oughtn't it to be simply 'Sir,' father, for an editor?" said Marjorie.

"Perhaps I didn't explain, Marjorie," said her father, with the calm of
great self-restraint, and dabbing his left hand on the manuscript in his
right, "that this is a _private_ letter--a private letter."

"I didn't understand," said Marjorie.

"It would have been evident as I went on," said Mr. Pope, and prepared
to read again.

This time he was allowed to proceed, but the interruptions had ruffled
him, and the gentle stresses that should have lifted the subtleties of
his irony into prominence missed the words, and he had to go back and do
his sentences again. Then Rom suddenly, horribly, uncontrollably, was
seized with hiccups. At the second hiccup Mr. Pope paused, and looked
very hard at his daughter with magnified eyes; as he was about to
resume, the third burst its way through the unhappy child's utmost
effort.

Mr. Pope rose with an awful resignation. "That's enough," he said. He
regarded the pseudo-twin vindictively. "You haven't the self-control of
a child of six," he said. Then very touchingly to Mrs. Pope: "Mummy,
shall we try a game of tennis with the New Generation?"

"Can't you read it after supper?" asked Mrs. Pope.

"It must go by the eight o'clock post," said Mr. Pope, putting the
masterpiece into his breast pocket, the little masterpiece that would
now perhaps never be read aloud to any human being. "Daffy, dear, do you
mind going in for the racquets and balls?"

The social atmosphere was now sultry, and overcast, and Mr. Pope's
decision to spend the interval before Daffy returned in seeing whether
he couldn't do something to the net, which was certainly very
unsatisfactory, did not improve matters. Then, unhappily, Marjorie, who
had got rather keen upon tennis at the Carmels', claimed her father's
first two services as faults, contrary to the etiquette of the family.
It happened that Mr. Pope had a really very good, hard, difficult,
smart-looking serve, whose only defect was that it always went either
too far or else into the net, and so a feeling had been fostered and
established by his wife that, on the whole, it was advisable to regard
the former variety as a legitimate extension of a father's authority.
Naturally, therefore, Mr. Pope was nettled at Marjorie's ruling, and his
irritation increased when his next two services to Daffy perished in the
net. ("Damn that net! Puts one's eye out.") Then Marjorie gave him an
unexpected soft return which he somehow muffed, and then Daffy just
dropped a return over the top of the net. (Love-game.) It was then
Marjorie's turn to serve, which she did with a new twist acquired from
the eldest Carmel boy that struck Mr. Pope as un-English. "Go on," he
said concisely. "Fifteen love."

She was gentle with her mother and they got their first rally, and when
it was over Mr. Pope had to explain to Marjorie that if she returned
right up into his corner of the court he would have to run backwards
very fast and might fall over down the silly <DW72> at that end. She
would have to consider him and the court. One didn't get everything out
of a game by playing merely to win. She said "All right, Daddy," rather
off-handedly, and immediately served to him again, and he, taken a
little unawares, hit the ball with the edge of his racquet and sent it
out, and then he changed racquets with Daffy--it seemed he had known all
along she had taken his, but he had preferred to say nothing--uttered a
word of advice to his wife just on her stroke, and she, failing to grasp
his intention as quickly as she ought to have done, left the score
forty-fifteen. He felt better when he returned Marjorie's serve, and
then before she could control herself she repeated her new unpleasant
trick of playing into the corner again, whereupon, leaping back with an
agility that would have shamed many a younger man, Mr. Pope came upon
disaster. He went spinning down the treacherous <DW72> behind, twisted
his ankle painfully and collapsed against the iron railings of the
shrubbery. It was too much, and he lost control of himself. His
daughters had one instant's glimpse of the linguistic possibilities of a
strong man's agony. "I told her," he went on as if he had said nothing.
"_Tennis!_"

For a second perhaps he seemed to hesitate upon a course of action. Then
as if by a great effort he took his coat from the net post and addressed
himself houseward, incarnate Grand Dudgeon--limping.

"Had enough of it, Mummy," he said, and added some happily inaudible
comment on Marjorie's new style of play.

The evening's exercise was at an end.

The three ladies regarded one another in silence for some moments.

"I will take in the racquets, dear," said Mrs. Pope.

"I think the other ball is at your end," said Daffy....

The apparatus put away, Marjorie and her sister strolled thoughtfully
away from the house.

"There's croquet here too," said Daffy. "We've not had the things out
yet!"....

"He'll play, I suppose."

"He wants to play."...

"Of course," said Marjorie after a long pause, "there's no _reasoning_
with Dad!"

Sec. 6

Character is one of England's noblest and most deliberate products, but
some Englishmen have it to excess. Mr. Pope had.

He was one of that large and representative class which imparts a
dignity to national commerce by inheriting big businesses from its
ancestors. He was a coach-builder by birth, and a gentleman by education
and training. He had been to City Merchant's and Cambridge.

Throughout the earlier half of the nineteenth century the Popes had been
the princes of the coach-building world. Mr. Pope's great-grandfather
had been a North London wheelwright of conspicuous dexterity and
integrity, who had founded the family business; his son, Mr. Pope's
grandfather, had made that business the occupation of his life and
brought it to the pinnacle of pre-eminence; his son, who was Marjorie's
grandfather, had displayed a lesser enthusiasm, left the house at the
works for a home ten miles away and sent a second son into the Church.
It was in the days of the third Pope that the business ceased to expand,
and began to suffer severely from the competition of an enterprising
person who had originally supplied the firm with varnish, gradually
picked up the trade in most other materials and accessories needed in
coach-building, and passed on by almost imperceptible stages to
delivering the article complete--dispensing at last altogether with the
intervention of Pope and Son--to the customer. Marjorie's father had
succeeded in the fulness of time to the inheritance this insurgent had
damaged.

Mr. Pope was a man of firm and resentful temper, with an admiration for
Cato, Brutus, Cincinnatus, Cromwell, Washington, and the sterner heroes
generally, and by nature a little ill-used and offended at things. He
suffered from indigestion and extreme irritability. He found himself in
control of a business where more flexible virtues were needed. The Popes
based their fame on a heavy, proud type of vehicle, which the increasing
luxury and triviality of the age tended to replace by lighter forms of
carriage, carriages with diminutive and apologetic names. As these
lighter forms were not only lighter but less expensive, Mr. Pope with a
pathetic confidence in the loyalty of the better class of West End
customer, determined to "make a stand" against them. He was the sort of
man to whom making a stand is in itself a sombre joy. If he had had to
choose his pose for a portrait, he would certainly have decided to have
one foot advanced, the other planted like a British oak behind, the arms
folded and the brows corrugated,--making a stand.

Unhappily the stars in their courses and the general improvement of
roads throughout the country fought against him. The lighter carriages,
and especially the lighter carriages of that varnish-selling firm, which
was now absorbing businesses right and left, prevailed over Mr. Pope's
resistance. For crossing a mountain pass or fording a river, for driving
over the scene of a recent earthquake or following a retreating army,
for being run away with by frantic horses or crushing a personal enemy,
there can be no doubt the Pope carriages remained to the very last the
best possible ones and fully worth the inflexible price demanded.
Unhappily all carriages in a civilization essentially decadent are not
subjected to these tests, and the manufactures of his rivals were not
only much cheaper, but had a sort of meretricious smartness, a
disingenuous elasticity, above all a levity, hateful indeed to the
spirit of Mr. Pope yet attractive to the wanton customer. Business
dwindled. Nevertheless the habitual element in the good class customer
did keep things going, albeit on a shrinking scale, until Mr. Pope came
to the unfortunate decision that he would make a stand against
automobiles. He regarded them as an intrusive nuisance which had to be
seen only to be disowned by the landed gentry of England. Rather than
build a car he said he would go out of business. He went out of
business. Within five years of this determination he sold out the name,
good will, and other vestiges of his concern to a mysterious buyer who
turned out to be no more than an agent for these persistently expanding
varnish makers, and he retired with a genuine grievance upon the family
accumulations--chiefly in Consols and Home Railways.

He refused however to regard his defeat as final, put great faith in the
approaching exhaustion of the petrol supply, and talked in a manner that
should have made the Automobile Association uneasy, of devoting the
rest of his days to the purification of England from these aggressive
mechanisms. "It was a mistake," he said, "to let them in." He became
more frequent at his excellent West End club, and directed a certain
portion of his capital to largely indecisive but on the whole
unprofitable speculations in South African and South American
enterprises. He mingled a little in affairs. He was a tough conventional
speaker, rich in established phrases and never abashed by hearing
himself say commonplace things, and in addition to his campaign against
automobiles he found time to engage also in quasi-political activities,
taking chairs, saying a few words and so on, cherishing a fluctuating
hope that his eloquence might ultimately win him an invitation to
contest a constituency in the interests of reaction and the sounder
elements in the Liberal party.

He had a public-spirited side, and he was particularly attracted by that
mass of modern legislative proposals which aims at a more systematic
control of the lives of lower class persons for their own good by their
betters. Indeed, in the first enthusiasm of his proprietorship of the
Pope works at East Purblow, he had organized one of those benevolent
industrial experiments that are now so common. He felt strongly against
the drink evil, that is to say, the unrestricted liberty of common
people to drink what they prefer, and he was acutely impressed by the
fact that working-class families do not spend their money in the way
that seems most desirable to upper middle-class critics. Accordingly he
did his best to replace the dangerous freedoms of money by that ideal of
the social reformer, Payment in Kind. To use his invariable phrase, the
East Purblow experiment did "no mean service" to the cause of social
reform. Unhappily it came to an end through a prosecution under the
Truck Act, that blot upon the Statute Book, designed, it would appear,
even deliberately to vitiate man's benevolent control of his fellow man.
The lessons to be drawn from that experience, however, grew if anything
with the years. He rarely spoke without an allusion to it, and it was
quite remarkable how readily it could be adapted to illuminate a hundred
different issues in the hospitable columns of the _Spectator_....

Sec. 7

At seven o'clock Marjorie found herself upstairs changing into her
apple-green frock. She had had a good refreshing wash in cold soft
water, and it was pleasant to change into thinner silk stockings and
dainty satin slippers and let down and at last brush her hair and dress
loiteringly after the fatigues of her journey and the activities of her
arrival. She looked out on the big church and the big trees behind it
against the golden quiet of a summer evening with extreme approval.

"I suppose those birds are rooks," she said.

But Daffy had gone to see that the pseudo-twins had done themselves
justice in their muslin frocks and pink sashes; they were apt to be a
little sketchy with their less accessible buttons.

Marjorie became aware of two gentlemen with her mother on the lawn
below.

One was her almost affianced lover, Will Magnet, the humorous writer.
She had been doing her best not to think about him all day, but now he
became an unavoidable central fact. She regarded him with an almost
perplexed scrutiny, and wondered vividly why she had been so excited and
pleased by his attentions during the previous summer.

Mr. Magnet was one of those quiet, deliberately unassuming people who do
not even attempt to be beautiful. Not for him was it to pretend, but to
prick the bladder of pretence. He was a fairish man of forty, pale, with
a large protuberant, observant grey eye--I speak particularly of the
left--and a face of quiet animation warily alert for the wit's
opportunity. His nose and chin were pointed, and his lips thin and
quaintly pressed together. He was dressed in grey, with a low-collared
silken shirt showing a thin neck, and a flowing black tie, and he
carried a grey felt hat in his joined hands behind his back. She could
hear the insinuating cadences of his voice as he talked in her mother's
ear. The other gentleman, silent on her mother's right, must, she knew,
be Mr. Wintersloan, whom Mr. Magnet had proposed to bring over. His
dress betrayed that modest gaiety of disposition becoming in an artist,
and indeed he was one of Mr. Magnet's favourite illustrators. He was in
a dark bluish-grey suit; a black tie that was quite unusually broad went
twice around his neck before succumbing to the bow, and his waistcoat
appeared to be of some gaily-patterned orange silk. Marjorie's eyes
returned to Mr. Magnet. Hitherto she had never had an opportunity of
remarking that his hair was more than a little attenuated towards the
crown. It was funny how his tie came out under his chin to the right.

What an odd thing men's dress had become, she thought. Why did they wear
those ridiculous collars and ties? Why didn't they always dress in
flannels and look as fine and slender and active as the elder Carmel boy
for example? Mr. Magnet couldn't be such an ill-shaped man. Why didn't
every one dress to be just as beautiful and splendid as
possible?--instead of wearing queer things!

"Coming down?" said Daffy, a vision of sulphur-yellow, appearing in the
doorway.

"Let _them_ go first," said Marjorie, with a finer sense of effect. "And
Theodore. We don't want to make part of a comic entry with Theodore,
Daffy."

Accordingly, the two sisters watched discreetly--they had to be wary on
account of Mr. Magnet's increasingly frequent glances at the
windows--and when at last all the rest of the family had appeared below,
they decided their cue had come. Mr. Pope strolled into the group, with
no trace of his recent debacle except a slight limp. He was wearing a
jacket of damson- velvet, which he affected in the country, and
all traces of his Grand Dudgeon were gone. But then he rarely had Grand
Dudgeon except in the sanctities of family life, and hardly ever when
any other man was about.

"Well," his daughters heard him say, with a witty allusiveness that was
difficult to follow, "so the Magnet has come to the Mountain again--eh?"

"Come on, Madge," said Daffy, and the two sisters emerged harmoniously
together from the house.

It would have been manifest to a meaner capacity than any present that
evening that Mr. Magnet regarded Marjorie with a distinguished
significance. He had two eyes, but he had that mysterious quality so
frequently associated with a bluish-grey iris which gives the effect of
looking hard with one large orb, a sort of grey searchlight effect, and
he used this eye ray now to convey a respectful but firm admiration in
the most unequivocal manner. He saluted Daffy courteously, and then
allowed himself to retain Marjorie's hand for just a second longer than
was necessary as he said--very simply--"I am very pleased indeed to meet
you again--very."

A slight embarrassment fell between them.

"You are staying near here, Mr. Magnet?"

"At the inn," said Mr. Magnet, and then, "I chose it because it would be
near you."

His eye pressed upon her again for a moment.

"Is it comfortable?" said Marjorie.

"So charmingly simple," said Mr. Magnet. "I love it."

A tinkling bell announced the preparedness of supper, and roused the
others to the consciousness that they were silently watching Mr. Magnet
and Marjorie.

"It's quite a simple farmhouse supper," said Mrs. Pope.

Sec. 8

There were ducks, green peas, and adolescent new potatoes for supper,
and afterwards stewed fruit and cream and junket and cheese, bottled
beer, Gilbey's Burgundy, and home-made lemonade. Mrs. Pope carved,
because Mr. Pope splashed too much, and bones upset him and made him
want to show up chicken in the _Times_. So he sat at the other end and
rallied his guests while Mrs. Pope distributed the viands. He showed not
a trace of his recent umbrage. Theodore sat between Daffy and his mother
because of his table manners, and Marjorie was on her father's right
hand and next to Mr. Wintersloan, while Mr. Magnet was in the middle of
the table on the opposite side in a position convenient for looking at
her. Both maids waited.

The presence of Magnet invariably stirred the latent humorist in Mr.
Pope. He felt that he who talks to humorists should himself be humorous,
and it was his private persuasion that with more attention he might have
been, to use a favourite form of expression, "no mean jester." Quite a
lot of little things of his were cherished as "Good" both by himself
and, with occasional inaccuracies, by Mrs. Pope. He opened out now in a
strain of rich allusiveness.

"What will you drink, Mr. Wintersloan?" he said. "Wine of the country,
yclept beer, red wine from France, or my wife's potent brew from the
golden lemon?"

Mr. Wintersloan thought he would take Burgundy. Mr. Magnet preferred
beer.

    "I've heard there's iron in the Beer,
    And I believe it,"

misquoted Mr. Pope, and nodded as it were to the marker to score. "Daffy
and Marjorie are still in the lemonade stage. Will you take a little
Burgundy to-night, Mummy?"

Mrs. Pope decided she would, and was inspired to ask Mr. Wintersloan if
he had been in that part of the country before. Topography ensued. Mr.
Wintersloan had a style of his own, and spoke of the Buryhamstreet
district as a "pooty little country--pooty little hills, with a swirl in
them."

This pleased Daffy and Marjorie, and their eyes met for a moment.

Then Mr. Magnet, with a ray full on Marjorie, said he had always been
fond of Surrey. "I think if ever I made a home in the country I should
like it to be here."

Mr. Wintersloan said Surrey would tire him, it was too bossy and curly,
too flocculent; he would prefer to look on broader, simpler lines, with
just a sudden catch in the breath in them--if you understand me?

Marjorie did, and said so.

"A sob--such as you get at the break of a pinewood on a hill."

This baffled Mr. Pope, but Marjorie took it. "Or the short dry cough of
a cliff," she said.

"Exactly," said Mr. Wintersloan, and having turned a little deliberate
close-lipped smile on her for a moment, resumed his wing.

"So long as a landscape doesn't _sneeze_" said Mr. Magnet, in that
irresistible dry way of his, and Rom and Sydney, at any rate, choked.

"Now is the hour when Landscapes yawn," mused Mr. Pope, coming in all
right at the end.

Then Mrs. Pope asked Mr. Wintersloan, about his route to Buryhamstreet,
and then Mr. Pope asked Mr. Magnet whether he was playing at a new work
or working at a new play.

Mr. Magnet said he was dreaming over a play. He wanted to bring out the
more serious side of his humour, go a little deeper into things than he
had hitherto done.

"Mingling smiles and tears," said Mr. Pope approvingly.

Mr. Magnet said very quietly that all true humour did that.

Then Mrs. Pope asked what the play was to be about, and Mr. Magnet, who
seemed disinclined to give an answer, turned the subject by saying he
had to prepare an address on humour for the next dinner of the
_Literati_. "It's to be a humourist's dinner, and they've made me the
guest of the evening--by way of a joke to begin with," he said with that
dry smile again.

Mrs. Pope said he shouldn't say things like that. She then said "Syd!"
quietly but sharply to Sydney, who was making a disdainful, squinting
face at Theodore, and told the parlourmaid to clear the plates for
sweets. Mr. Magnet professed great horror of public speaking. He said
that whenever he rose to make an after-dinner speech all the ices he had
ever eaten seemed to come out of the past, and sit on his backbone.

The talk centered for awhile on Mr. Magnet's address, and apropos of
Tests of Humour Mr. Pope, who in his way was "no mean raconteur,"
related the story of the man who took the salad dressing with his hand,
and when his host asked why he did that, replied: "Oh! I thought it was
spinach!"

"Many people," added Mr. Pope, "wouldn't see the point of that. And if
they don't see the point they can't--and the more they try the less they
do."

All four girls hoped secretly and not too confidently that their
laughter had not sounded hollow.

And then for a time the men told stories as they came into their heads
in an easy, irresponsible way. Mr. Magnet spoke of the humour of the
omnibus-driver who always dangled and twiddled his badge "by way of a
joke" when he passed the conductor whose father had been hanged, and Mr.
Pope, perhaps, a little irrelevantly, told the story of the little boy
who was asked his father's last words, and said "mother was with him to
the end," which particularly amused Mrs. Pope. Mr. Wintersloan gave the
story of the woman who was taking her son to the hospital with his head
jammed into a saucepan, and explained to the other people in the
omnibus: "You see, what makes it so annoying, it's me only saucepan!"
Then they came back to the Sense of Humour with the dentist who shouted
with laughter, and when asked the reason by his patient, choked out:
"Wrong tooth!" and then Mr. Pope reminded them of the heartless husband
who, suddenly informed that his mother-in-law was dead, exclaimed "Oh,
don't make me laugh, please, I've got a split lip...."

Sec. 9

The conversation assumed a less anecdotal quality with the removal to
the drawing-room. On Mr. Magnet's initiative the gentlemen followed the
ladies almost immediately, and it was Mr. Magnet who remembered that
Marjorie could sing.

Both the elder sisters indeed had sweet clear voices, and they had
learnt a number of those jolly songs the English made before the dull
Hanoverians came. Syd accompanied, and Rom sat back in the low chair in
the corner and fell deeply in love with Mr. Wintersloan. The three
musicians in their green and sulphur-yellow and white made a pretty
group in the light of the shaded lamp against the black and gold
Broadwood, the tawdry screen, its pattern thin glittering upon darkness,
and the deep shadows behind. Marjorie loved singing, and forgot herself
as she sang.

    "I love, and he loves me again,
      Yet dare I not tell who;
    For if the nymphs should know my swain,
      I fear they'd love him too,"

she sang, and Mr. Magnet could not conceal the intensity of his
admiration.

Mr. Pope had fallen into a pleasant musing; several other ripe old
yarns, dear delicious old things, had come into his mind that he felt he
might presently recall when this unavoidable display of accomplishments
was overpast, and it was with one of them almost on his lips that he
glanced across at his guest. He was surprised to see Mr. Magnet's face
transfigured. He was sitting forward, looking up at Marjorie, and he had
caught something of the expression of those blessed boys who froth at
the feet of an Assumption. For an instant Mr. Pope did not understand.

Then he understood. It was Marjorie! He had a twinge of surprise, and
glanced at his own daughter as though he had never seen her before. He
perceived in a flash for the first time that this troublesome, clever,
disrespectful child was tall and shapely and sweet, and indeed quite a
beautiful young woman. He forgot his anecdotes. His being was suffused
with pride and responsibility and the sense of virtue rewarded. He did
not reflect for a moment that Marjorie embodied in almost equal
proportions the very best points in his mother and his mother-in-law,
and avoided his own more salient characteristics with so neat a
dexterity that from top to toe, except for the one matter of colour, not
only did she not resemble him but she scarcely even alluded to him. He
thought simply that she was his daughter, that she derived from him,
that her beauty was his. She was the outcome of his meritorious
preparations. He recalled all the moments when he had been kind and
indulgent to her, all the bills he had paid for her; all the stresses
and trials of the coach-building collapse, all the fluctuations of his
speculative adventures, became things he had faced patiently and
valiantly for her sake. He forgot the endless times when he had been
viciously cross with her, all the times when he had pished and tushed
and sworn in her hearing. He had on provocation and in spite of her
mother's protests slapped her pretty vigorously, but such things are
better forgotten; nor did he recall how bitterly he had opposed the
college education which had made her now so clear in eye and thought,
nor the frightful shindy, only three months since, about that identical
green dress in which she now stood delightful. He forgot these petty
details, as an idealist should. There she was, his daughter. An immense
benevolence irradiated his soul--for Marjorie--for Magnet. His eyes were
suffused with a not ignoble tenderness. The man, he knew, was worth at
least thirty-five thousand pounds, a discussion of investments had made
that clear, and he must be making at least five thousand a year! A
beautiful girl, a worthy man! A good fellow, a sound good fellow, a
careful fellow too--as these fellows went!

Old Daddy would lose his treasure of course.

Well, a father must learn resignation, and he for one would not stand in
the way of his girl's happiness. A day would come when, very beautifully
and tenderly, he would hand her over to Magnet, his favourite daughter
to his trusted friend. "Well, my boy, there's no one in all the
world----" he would begin.

It would be a touching parting. "Don't forget your old father, Maggots,"
he would say. At such a moment that quaint nickname would surely not be
resented....

He reflected how much he had always preferred Marjorie to Daffy. She was
brighter--more like him. Daffy was unresponsive, with a touch of
bitterness under her tongue....

He was already dreaming he was a widower, rather infirm, the object of
Magnet's and Marjorie's devoted care, when the song ceased, and the wife
he had for the purpose of reveries just consigned so carelessly to the
cemetery proposed that they should have a little game that every one
could play at. A number of pencils and slips of paper appeared in her
hands. She did not want the girls to exhaust their repertory on this
first occasion--and besides, Mr. Pope liked games in which one did
things with pencils and strips of paper. Mr. Magnet wished the singing
to go on, he said, but he was overruled.

So for a time every one played a little game in which Mr. Pope was
particularly proficient. Indeed, it was rare that any one won but Mr.
Pope. It was called "The Great Departed," and it had such considerable
educational value that all the children had to play at it whenever he
wished.

It was played in this manner; one of the pseudo twins opened a book and
dabbed a finger on the page, and read out the letter immediately at the
tip of her finger, then all of them began to write as hard as they
could, writing down the names of every great person they could think of,
whose name began with that letter. At the end of five minutes Mr. Pope
said Stop! and then began to read his list out, beginning with the first
name. Everybody who had that name crossed it out and scored one, and
after his list was exhausted all the surviving names on the next list
were read over in the same way, and so on. The names had to be the names
of dead celebrated people, only one monarch of the same name of the same
dynasty was allowed, and Mr. Pope adjudicated on all doubtful cases. It
was great fun.

The first two games were won as usual by Mr. Pope, and then Mr.
Wintersloan, who had been a little distraught in his manner, brightened
up and scribbled furiously.

The letter was _D_, and after Mr. Pope had rehearsed a tale of nine and
twenty names, Mr. Wintersloan read out his list in that curious voice of
his which suggested nothing so much as some mobile drink glucking out of
the neck of a bottle held upside down.

"Dahl," he began.

"Who was Dahl?" asked Mr. Pope.

"'Vented dahlias," said Mr. Wintersloan, with a sigh. "Danton."

"Forgot him," said Mr. Pope.

"Davis."

"Davis?"

"Davis Straits. Doe."

"Who?"

"John Doe, Richard Roe."

"Legal fiction, I'm afraid," said Mr. Pope.

"Dam," said Mr. Wintersloan, and added after a slight pause: "Anthony
van."

Mr. Pope made an interrogative noise.

"Painter--eighteenth century--Dutch. Dam, Jan van, his son. Dam,
Frederich van. Dam, Wilhelm van. Dam, Diedrich van. Dam, Wilhelmina,
wood engraver, gifted woman. Diehl."

"Who?"

"Painter--dead--famous. See Duesseldorf. It's all painters now--all
guaranteed dead, all good men. Deeds of Norfolk, the aquarellist,
Denton, Dibbs."

"Er?" said Mr. Pope.

"The Warwick Claude, _you_ know. Died 1823."

"Dickson, Dunting, John Dickery. Peter Dickery, William Dock--I beg your
pardon?"

Mr. Pope was making a protesting gesture, but Mr. Wintersloan's bearing
was invincible, and he proceeded.

In the end he emerged triumphant with forty-nine names, mostly painters
for whose fame he answered, but whose reputations were certainly new to
every one else present. "I can go on like that," said Mr. Wintersloan,
"with any letter," and turned that hard little smile full on Marjorie.
"I didn't see how to do it at first. I just cast about. But I know a
frightful lot of painters. No end. Shall we try again?"

Marjorie glanced at her father. Mr. Wintersloan's methods were all too
evident to her. A curious feeling pervaded the room that Mr. Pope didn't
think Mr. Wintersloan's conduct honourable, and that he might even go
some way towards saying so.

So Mrs. Pope became very brisk and stirring, and said she thought that
now perhaps a charade would be more amusing. It didn't do to keep on at
a game too long. She asked Rom and Daphne and Theodore and Mr.
Wintersloan to go out, and they all agreed readily, particularly Rom.
"Come on!" said Rom to Mr. Wintersloan. Everybody else shifted into an
audience-like group between the piano and the what-not. Mr. Magnet sat
at Marjorie's feet, while Syd played a kind of voluntary, and Mr. Pope
leant back in his chair, with his brows knit and lips moving, trying to
remember something.

The charade _was_ very amusing. The word was Catarrh, and Mr.
Wintersloan, as the patient in the last act being given gruel, surpassed
even the children's very high expectations. Rom, as his nurse, couldn't
keep her hands off him. Then the younger people kissed round and were
packed off to bed, and the rest of the party went to the door upon the
lawn and admired the night. It was a glorious summer night, deep blue,
and rimmed warmly by the afterglow, moonless, and with a few big
lamp-like stars above the black still shapes of trees.

Mrs. Pope said they would all accompany their guests to the gate at the
end of the avenue--in spite of the cockchafers.

Mr. Pope's ankle, however, excused him; the cordiality of his parting
from Mr. Wintersloan seemed a trifle forced, and he limped thoughtfully
and a little sombrely towards the study to see if he could find an
Encyclopaedia or some such book of reference that would give the names of
the lesser lights of Dutch, Italian, and English painting during the
last two centuries.

He felt that Mr. Wintersloan had established an extraordinarily bad
precedent.

Sec. 10

Marjorie discovered that she and Mr. Magnet had fallen a little behind
the others. She would have quickened her pace, but Mr. Magnet stopped
short and said: "Marjorie!"

"When I saw you standing there and singing," said Mr. Magnet, and was
short of breath for a moment.

Marjorie's natural gift for interruption failed her altogether.

"I felt I would rather be able to call you mine--than win an empire."

The pause seemed to lengthen, between them, and Marjorie's remark when
she made it at last struck her even as she made it as being but poorly
conceived. She had some weak idea of being self-depreciatory.

"I think you had better win an empire, Mr. Magnet," she said meekly.

Then, before anything more was possible, they had come up to Daffy and
Mr. Wintersloan and her mother at the gate....

As they returned Mrs. Pope was loud in the praises of Will Magnet. She
had a little clear-cut voice, very carefully and very skilfully
controlled, and she dilated on his modesty, his quiet helpfulness at
table, his ready presence of mind. She pointed out instances of those
admirable traits, incidents small in themselves but charming in their
implications. When somebody wanted junket, he had made no fuss, he had
just helped them to junket. "So modest and unassuming," sang Mrs. Pope.
"You'd never dream he was quite rich and famous. Yet every book he
writes is translated into Russian and German and all sorts of languages.
I suppose he's almost the greatest humorist we have. That play of his;
what is it called?--_Our Owd Woman_--has been performed nearly twelve
hundred times! I think that is the most wonderful of gifts. Think of the
people it has made happy."

The conversation was mainly monologue. Both Marjorie and Daffy were
unusually thoughtful.

Sec. 11

Marjorie ended the long day in a worldly mood.

"Penny for your thoughts," said Daffy abruptly, brushing the long
firelit rapids of her hair.

"Not for sale," said Marjorie, and roused herself. "I've had a long
day."

"It's always just the time I particularly wish I was a man," she
remarked after a brief return to meditation. "Fancy, no hair-pins, no
brushing, no tie-up to get lost about, no strings. I suppose they
haven't strings?"

"They haven't," said Daffy with conviction.

She met Marjorie's interrogative eye. "Father would swear at them," she
explained. "He'd naturally tie himself up--and we should hear of it."

"I didn't think of that," said Marjorie, and stuck out her chin upon her
fists. "Sound induction."

She forgot this transitory curiosity.

"Suppose one had a maid, Daffy--a real maid ... a maid who mended your
things ... did your hair while you read...."

"Oh! here goes," and she stood up and grappled with the task of
undressing.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE TWO PROPOSALS OF MR. MAGNET

Sec. 1

It was presently quite evident to Marjorie that Mr. Magnet intended to
propose marriage to her, and she did not even know whether she wanted
him to do so.

She had met him first the previous summer while she had been staying
with the Petley-Cresthams at High Windower, and it had been evident that
he found her extremely attractive. She had never had a real grown man at
her feet before, and she had found it amazingly entertaining. She had
gone for a walk with him the morning before she came away--a frank and
ingenuous proceeding that made Mrs. Petley-Crestham say the girl knew
what she was about, and she had certainly coquetted with him in an
extraordinary manner at golf-croquet. After that Oxbridge had swallowed
her up, and though he had called once on her mother while Marjorie was
in London during the Christmas vacation, he hadn't seen her again. He
had written--which was exciting--a long friendly humorous letter about
nothing in particular, with an air of its being quite the correct thing
for him to do, and she had answered, and there had been other exchanges.
But all sorts of things had happened in the interval, and Marjorie had
let him get into quite a back place in her thoughts--the fact that he
was a member of her father's club had seemed somehow to remove him from
a great range of possibilities--until a drift in her mother's talk
towards him and a letter from him with an indefinable change in tone
towards intimacy, had restored him to importance. Now here he was in the
foreground of her world again, evidently more ardent than ever, and with
a portentous air of being about to do something decisive at the very
first opportunity. What was he going to do? What had her mother been
hinting at? And what, in fact, did the whole thing amount to?

Marjorie was beginning to realize that this was going to be a very
serious affair indeed for her--and that she was totally unprepared to
meet it.

It had been very amusing, very amusing indeed, at the Petley-Cresthams',
but there were moments now when she felt towards Mr. Magnet exactly as
she would have felt if he had been one of the Oxbridge tradesmen
hovering about her with a "little account," full of apparently
exaggerated items....

Her thoughts and feelings were all in confusion about this business. Her
mind was full of scraps, every sort of idea, every sort of attitude
contributed something to that Twentieth Century jumble. For example, and
so far as its value went among motives, it was by no means a trivial
consideration; she wanted a proposal for its own sake. Daffy had had a
proposal last year, and although it wasn't any sort of eligible
proposal, still there it was, and she had given herself tremendous airs.
But Marjorie would certainly have preferred some lighter kind of
proposal than that which now threatened her. She felt that behind Mr.
Magnet were sanctions; that she wasn't free to deal with this proposal
as she liked. He was at Buryhamstreet almost with the air of being her
parents' guest.

Less clear and more instinctive than her desire for a proposal was her
inclination to see just all that Mr. Magnet was disposed to do, and hear
all that he was disposed to say. She was curious. He didn't behave in
the least as she had expected a lover to behave. But then none of the
boys, the "others" with whom she had at times stretched a hand towards
the hem of emotion, had ever done that. She had an obscure feeling that
perhaps presently Mr. Magnet must light up, be stirred and stirring.
Even now his voice changed very interestingly when he was alone with
her. His breath seemed to go--as though something had pricked his lung.
If it hadn't been for that new, disconcerting realization of an official
pressure behind him, I think she would have been quite ready to
experiment extensively with his emotions....

But she perceived as she lay awake next morning that she wasn't free for
experiments any longer. What she might say or do now would be taken up
very conclusively. And she had no idea what she wanted to say or do.

Marriage regarded in the abstract--that is to say, with Mr. Magnet out
of focus--was by no means an unattractive proposal to her. It was very
much at the back of Marjorie's mind that after Oxbridge, unless she was
prepared to face a very serious row indeed and go to teach in a
school--and she didn't feel any call whatever to teach in a school--she
would probably have to return to Hartstone Square and share Daffy's room
again, and assist in the old collective, wearisome task of propitiating
her father. The freedoms of Oxbridge had enlarged her imagination until
that seemed an almost unendurably irksome prospect. She had tasted life
as it could be in her father's absence, and she was beginning to realize
just what an impossible person he was. Marriage was escape from all
that; it meant not only respectful parents but a house of her very own,
furniture of her choice, great freedom of movement, an authority, an
importance. She had seen what it meant to be a prosperously married
young woman in the person of one or two resplendent old girls revisiting
Bennett College, scattering invitations, offering protections and
opportunities....

Of course there is love.

Marjorie told herself, as she had been trained to tell herself, to be
sensible, but something within her repeated: _there is love_.

Of course she liked Mr. Magnet. She really did like Mr. Magnet very
much. She had had her girlish dreams, had fallen in love with pictures
of men and actors and a music master and a man who used to ride by as
she went to school; but wasn't this desolating desire for
self-abandonment rather silly?--something that one left behind with much
else when it came to putting up one's hair and sensible living,
something to blush secretly about and hide from every eye?

Among other discrepant views that lived together in her mind as cats and
rats and parrots and squirrels and so forth used to live together in
those Happy Family cages unseemly men in less well-regulated days were
wont to steer about our streets, was one instilled by quite a large
proportion of the novels she had read, that a girl was a sort of
self-giving prize for high moral worth. Mr. Magnet she knew was good,
was kind, was brave with that truer courage, moral courage, which goes
with his type of physique; he was modest, unassuming, well off and
famous, and very much in love with her. His True Self, as Mrs. Pope had
pointed out several times, must be really very beautiful, and in some
odd way a line of Shakespeare had washed up in her consciousness as
being somehow effectual on his behalf:

    "Love looks not with the eye but with the mind."

She felt she ought to look with the mind. Nice people surely never
looked in any other way. It seemed from this angle almost her duty to
love him....

Perhaps she did love him, and mistook the symptoms. She did her best to
mistake the symptoms. But if she did truly love him, would it seem so
queer and important and antagonistic as it did that his hair was rather
thin upon the crown of his head?

She wished she hadn't looked down on him....

Poor Marjorie! She was doing her best to be sensible, and she felt
herself adrift above a clamorous abyss of feared and forbidden thoughts.
Down there she knew well enough it wasn't thus that love must come. Deep
in her soul, the richest thing in her life indeed and the best thing she
had to give humanity, was a craving for beauty that at times became
almost intolerable, a craving for something other than beauty and yet
inseparably allied with it, a craving for deep excitement, for a sort of
glory in adventure, for passion--for things akin to great music and
heroic poems and bannered traditions of romance. She had hidden away in
her an immense tumultuous appetite for life, an immense tumultuous
capacity for living. To be loved beautifully was surely the crown and
climax of her being.

She did not dare to listen to these deeps, yet these insurgent voices
filled her. Even while she drove her little crocodile of primly sensible
thoughts to their sane appointed conclusion, her blood and nerves and
all her being were protesting that Mr. Magnet would not do, that
whatever other worthiness was in him, regarded as a lover he was
preposterous and flat and foolish and middle-aged, and that it were
better never to have lived than to put the treasure of her life to his
meagre lips and into his hungry, unattractive arms. "The ugliness of
it! The spiritless horror of it!" so dumbly and formlessly the rebel
voices urged.

"One has to be sensible," said Marjorie to herself, suddenly putting
down Shaw's book on Municipal Trading, which she imagined she had been
reading....

(Perhaps all marriage was horrid, and one had to get over it.)

That was rather what her mother had conveyed to her.

Sec. 2

Mr. Magnet made his first proposal in form three days later, after
coming twice to tea and staying on to supper. He had played croquet with
Mr. Pope, he had been beaten twelve times in spite of twinges in the
sprained ankle--heroically borne--had had three victories lucidly
explained away, and heard all the particulars of the East Purblow
experiment three times over, first in relation to the new Labour
Exchanges, then regarded at rather a different angle in relation to
female betting, tally-men, and the sanctities of the home generally, and
finally in a more exhaustive style, to show its full importance from
every side and more particularly as demonstrating the gross injustice
done to Mr. Pope by the neglect of its lessons, a neglect too systematic
to be accidental, in the social reform literature of the time. Moreover,
Mr. Magnet had been made to understand thoroughly how several later
quasi-charitable attempts of a similar character had already become, or
must inevitably become, unsatisfactory through their failure to follow
exactly in the lines laid down by Mr. Pope.

Mr. Pope was really very anxious to be pleasant and agreeable to Mr.
Magnet, and he could think of no surer way of doing so than by giving
him an unrestrained intimacy of conversation that prevented anything
more than momentary intercourse between his daughter and her admirer.
And not only did Mr. Magnet find it difficult to get away from Mr. Pope
without offence, but whenever by any chance Mr. Pope was detached for a
moment Mr. Magnet discovered that Marjorie either wasn't to be seen, or
if she was she wasn't to be isolated by any device he could contrive,
before the unappeasable return of Mr. Pope.

Mr. Magnet did not get his chance therefore until Lady Petchworth's
little gathering at Summerhay Park.

Lady Petchworth was Mrs. Pope's oldest friend, and one of those brighter
influences which save our English country-side from lassitude. She had
been more fortunate than Mrs. Pope, for while Mr. Pope with that
aptitude for disadvantage natural to his temperament had, he said, been
tied to a business that never gave him a chance, Lady Petchworth's
husband had been a reckless investor of exceptional good-luck. In
particular, led by a dream, he had put most of his money into a series
of nitrate deposits in caves in Saghalien haunted by benevolent
penguins, and had been rewarded beyond the dreams of avarice. His
foresight had received the fitting reward of a knighthood, and Sir
Thomas, after restoring the Parish Church at Summerhay in a costly and
destructive manner, spent his declining years in an enviable contentment
with Lady Petchworth and the world at large, and died long before
infirmity made him really troublesome.

Good fortune had brought out Lady Petchworth's social aptitudes.
Summerhay Park was everything that a clever woman, inspired by that
gardening literature which has been so abundant in the opening years of
the twentieth century, could make it. It had rosaries and rock gardens,
sundials and yew hedges, pools and ponds, lead figures and stone urns,
box borderings and wilderness corners and hundreds and hundreds of feet
of prematurely-aged red-brick wall with broad herbaceous borders; the
walks had primroses, primulas and cowslips in a quite disingenuous
abundance, and in spring the whole extent of the park was gay, here with
thousands of this sort of daffodil just bursting out and here with
thousands of that sort of narcissus just past its prime, and every patch
ready to pass itself off in its naturalized way as the accidental native
flower of the field, if only it hadn't been for all the other different
varieties coming on or wilting-off in adjacent patches....

Her garden was only the beginning of Lady Petchworth's activities. She
had a model dairy, and all her poultry was white, and so far as she was
able to manage it she made Summerhay a model village. She overflowed
with activities, it was astonishing in one so plump and blonde, and
meeting followed meeting in the artistic little red-brick and
green-stained timber village hall she had erected. Now it was the
National Theatre and now it was the National Mourning; now it was the
Break Up of the Poor Law, and now the Majority Report, now the Mothers'
Union, and now Socialism, and now Individualism, but always something
progressive and beneficial. She did her best to revive the old village
life, and brought her very considerable powers of compulsion to make the
men dance in simple old Morris dances, dressed up in costumes they
secretly abominated, and to induce the mothers to dress their children
in art- smocks instead of the prints and blue serge frocks they
preferred. She did not despair, she said, of creating a spontaneous
peasant art movement in the district, springing from the people and
expressing the people, but so far it had been necessary to import not
only instructors and material, but workers to keep the thing going, so
sluggish had the spontaneity of our English countryside become.

Her little gatherings were quite distinctive of her. They were a sort of
garden party extending from mid-day to six or seven; there would be a
nucleus of house guests, and the highways and byeways on every hand
would be raided to supply persons and interests. She had told her friend
to "bring the girls over for the day," and flung an invitation to Mr.
Pope, who had at once excused himself on the score of his ankle. Mr.
Pope was one of those men who shun social gatherings--ostensibly because
of a sterling simplicity of taste, but really because his intolerable
egotism made him feel slighted and neglected on these occasions. He told
his wife he would be far happier with a book at home, exhorted her not
to be late, and was seen composing himself to read the "Vicar of
Wakefield"--whenever they published a new book Mr. Pope pretended to
read an old one--as the hired waggonette took the rest of his
family--Theodore very unhappy in buff silk and a wide Stuart
collar--down the avenue.

They found a long lunch table laid on the lawn beneath the chestnuts,
and in full view of the poppies and forget-me-nots around the stone
obelisk, a butler and three men servants with brass buttons and red and
white striped waistcoats gave dignity to the scene, and beyond, on the
terrace amidst abundance of deckchairs, cane chairs, rugs, and cushions,
a miscellaneous and increasing company seethed under Lady Petchworth's
plump but entertaining hand. There were, of course, Mr. Magnet, and his
friend Mr. Wintersloan--Lady Petchworth had been given to understand
how the land lay; and there was Mr. Bunford Paradise the musician, who
was doing his best to teach a sullen holiday class in the village
schoolroom to sing the artless old folk songs of Surrey again, in spite
of the invincible persuasion of everybody in the class that the songs
were rather indelicate and extremely silly; there were the Rev. Jopling
Baynes, and two Cambridge undergraduates in flannels, and a Doctor
something or other from London. There was also the Hon. Charles Muskett,
Lord Pottinger's cousin and estate agent, in tweeds and very helpful.
The ladies included Mrs. Raff, the well-known fashion writer, in a
wonderful costume, the anonymous doctor's wife, three or four
neighbouring mothers with an undistinguished daughter or so, and two
quiet-mannered middle-aged ladies, whose names Marjorie could not catch,
and whom Lady Petchworth, in that well-controlled voice of hers,
addressed as Kate and Julia, and seemed on the whole disposed to treat
as humorous. There was also Fraulein Schmidt in charge of Lady
Petchworth's three tall and already abundant children, Prunella,
Prudence, and Mary, and a young, newly-married couple of cousins, who
addressed each other in soft undertones and sat apart. These were the
chief items that became distinctive in Marjorie's survey; but there were
a number of other people who seemed to come and go, split up, fuse,
change their appearance slightly, and behave in the way inadequately
apprehended people do behave on these occasions.

Marjorie very speedily found her disposition to take a detached and
amused view of the entertainment in conflict with more urgent demands.
From the outset Mr. Magnet loomed upon her--he loomed nearer and nearer.
He turned his eye upon her as she came up to the wealthy expanse of
Lady Petchworth's presence, like some sort of obsolescent iron-clad
turning a dull-grey, respectful, loving searchlight upon a fugitive
torpedo boat, and thereafter he seemed to her to be looking at her
without intermission, relentlessly, and urging himself towards her. She
wished he wouldn't. She hadn't at all thought he would on this occasion.

At first she relied upon her natural powers of evasion, and the presence
of a large company. Then gradually it became apparent that Lady
Petchworth and her mother, yes--and the party generally, and the gardens
and the weather and the stars in their courses were of a mind to
co-operate in giving opportunity for Mr. Magnet's unmistakable
intentions.

And Marjorie with that instability of her sex which has been a theme for
masculine humour in all ages, suddenly and with an extraordinary
violence didn't want to make up her mind about Mr. Magnet. She didn't
want to accept him; and as distinctly she didn't want to refuse him. She
didn't even want to be thought about as making up her mind about
him--which was, so to speak, an enlargement of her previous
indisposition. She didn't even want to seem to avoid him, or to be
thinking about him, or aware of his existence.

After the greeting of Lady Petchworth she had succeeded very clumsily in
not seeing Mr. Magnet, and had addressed herself to Mr. Wintersloan, who
was standing a little apart, looking under his hand, with one eye shut,
at the view between the tree stems towards Buryhamstreet. He told her
that he thought he had found something "pooty" that hadn't been done,
and she did her best to share his artistic interests with a vivid sense
of Mr. Magnet's tentative incessant approach behind her.

He joined them, and she made a desperate attempt to entangle Mr.
Wintersloan in a three-cornered talk in vain. He turned away at the
first possible opportunity, and left her to an embarrassed and
eloquently silent _tete-a-tete_. Mr. Magnet's professional wit had
deserted him. "It's nice to see you again," he said after an immense
interval. "Shall we go and look at the aviary?"

"I hate to see birds in cages," said Marjorie, "and it's frightfully
jolly just here. Do you think Mr. Wintersloan will paint this? He does
paint, doesn't he?"

"I know him best in black and white," said Mr. Magnet.

Marjorie embarked on entirely insincere praises of Mr. Wintersloan's
manner and personal effect; Magnet replied tepidly, with an air of
reserving himself to grapple with the first conversational opportunity.

"It's a splendid day for tennis," said Marjorie. "I think I shall play
tennis all the afternoon."

"I don't play well enough for this publicity."

"It's glorious exercise," said Marjorie. "Almost as good as dancing,"
and she decided to stick to that resolution. "I never lose a chance of
tennis if I can help it."

She glanced round and detected a widening space between themselves and
the next adjacent group.

"They're looking at the goldfish," she said. "Let us join them."

Everyone moved away as they came up to the little round pond, but then
Marjorie had luck, and captured Prunella, and got her to hold hands and
talk, until Fraulein Schmidt called the child away. And then Marjorie
forced Mr. Magnet to introduce her to Mr. Bunford Paradise. She had a
bright idea of sitting between Prunella and Mary at the lunch table,
but a higher providence had assigned her to a seat at the end between
Julia--or was it Kate?--and Mr. Magnet. However, one of the
undergraduates was opposite, and she saved herself from undertones by
talking across to him boldly about Newnham, though she hadn't an idea of
his name or college. From that she came to tennis. To her inflamed
imagination he behaved as if she was under a Taboo, but she was
desperate, and had pledged him and his friend to a foursome before the
meal was over.

"Don't _you_ play?" said the undergraduate to Mr. Magnet.

"Very little," said Mr. Magnet. "Very little--"

At the end of an hour she was conspicuously and publicly shepherded from
the tennis court by Mrs. Pope.

"Other people want to play," said her mother in a clear little
undertone.

Mr. Magnet fielded her neatly as she came off the court.

"You play tennis like--a wild bird," he said, taking possession of her.

Only Marjorie's entire freedom from Irish blood saved him from a
vindictive repartee.

Sec. 3

"Shall we go and look at the aviary?" said Mr. Magnet, reverting to a
favourite idea of his, and then remembered she did not like to see caged
birds.

"Perhaps we might see the Water Garden?" he said. "The Water Garden is
really very delightful indeed--anyhow. You ought to see that."

On the spur of the moment, Marjorie could think of no objection to the
Water Garden, and he led her off.

"I often think of that jolly walk we had last summer," said Mr. Magnet,
"and how you talked about your work at Oxbridge."

Marjorie fell into a sudden rapture of admiration for a butterfly.

Twice more was Mr. Magnet baffled, and then they came to the little pool
of water lilies with its miniature cascade of escape at the head and
source of the Water Garden. "One of Lady Petchworth's great successes,"
said Mr. Magnet.

"I suppose the lotus is like the water-lily," said Marjorie, with no
hope of staving off the inevitable----

She stood very still by the little pool, and in spite of her pensive
regard of the floating blossoms, stiffly and intensely aware of his
relentless regard.

"Marjorie," came his voice at last, strangely softened. "There is
something I want to say to you."

She made no reply.

"Ever since we met last summer----"

A clear cold little resolution not to stand this, had established itself
in Marjorie's mind. If she must decide, she _would_ decide. He had
brought it upon himself.

"Marjorie," said Mr. Magnet, "I love you."

She lifted a clear unhesitating eye to his face. "I'm sorry, Mr.
Magnet," she said.

"I wanted to ask you to marry me," he said.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Magnet," she repeated.

They looked at one another. She felt a sort of scared exultation at
having done it; her mother might say what she liked.

"I love you very much," he said, at a loss.

"I'm sorry," she repeated obstinately.

"I thought you cared for me a little."

She left that unanswered. She had a curious feeling that there was no
getting away from this splashing, babbling pool, that she was fixed
there until Mr. Magnet chose to release her, and that he didn't mean to
release her yet. In which case she would go on refusing.

"I'm disappointed," he said.

Marjorie could only think that she was sorry again, but as she had
already said that three times, she remained awkwardly silent.

"Is it because----" he began and stopped.

"It isn't because of anything. Please let's go back to the others, Mr.
Magnet. I'm sorry if I'm disappointing."

And by a great effort she turned about.

Mr. Magnet remained regarding her--I can only compare it to the
searching preliminary gaze of an artistic photographer. For a crucial
minute in his life Marjorie hated him. "I don't understand," he said at
last.

Then with a sort of naturalness that ought to have touched her he said:
"Is it possible, Marjorie--that I might hope?--that I have been
inopportune?"

She answered at once with absolute conviction.

"I don't think so, Mr. Magnet."

"I'm sorry," he said, "to have bothered you."

"_I'm_ sorry," said Marjorie.

A long silence followed.

"I'm sorry too," he said.

They said no more, but began to retrace their steps. It was over.
Abruptly, Mr. Magnet's bearing had become despondent--conspicuously
despondent. "I had hoped," he said, and sighed.

With a thrill of horror Marjorie perceived he meant to _look_ rejected,
let every one see he had been rejected--after encouragement.

What would they think? How would they look? What conceivably might they
not say? Something of the importance of the thing she had done, became
manifest to her. She felt first intimations of regret. They would all be
watching, Mother, Daffy, Lady Petchworth. She would reappear with this
victim visibly suffering beside her. What could she say to straighten
his back and lift his chin? She could think of nothing. Ahead at the end
of the shaded path she could see the copious white form, the agitated
fair wig and red sunshade of Lady Petchworth----

Sec. 4

Mrs. Pope's eye was relentless; nothing seemed hidden from it; nothing
indeed was hidden from it; Mr. Magnet's back was diagrammatic. Marjorie
was a little flushed and bright-eyed, and professed herself eager, with
an unnatural enthusiasm, to play golf-croquet. It was eloquently
significant that Mr. Magnet did not share her eagerness, declined to
play, and yet when she had started with the Rev. Jopling Baynes as
partner, stood regarding the game with a sort of tender melancholy from
the shade of the big chestnut-tree.

Mrs. Pope joined him unobtrusively.

"You're not playing, Mr. Magnet," she remarked.

"I'm a looker-on, this time," he said with a sigh.

"Marjorie's winning, I think," said Mrs. Pope.

He made no answer for some seconds.

"She looks so charming in that blue dress," he remarked at last, and
sighed from the lowest deeps.

"That bird's-egg blue suits her," said Mrs. Pope, ignoring the sigh.
"She's clever in her girlish way, she chooses all her own
dresses,--colours, material, everything."

(And also, though Mrs. Pope had not remarked it, she concealed her
bills.)

There came a still longer interval, which Mrs. Pope ended with the
slightest of shivers. She perceived Mr. Magnet was heavy for sympathy
and ripe to confide. "I think," she said, "it's a little cool here.
Shall we walk to the Water Garden, and see if there are any white
lilies?"

"There are," said Mr. Magnet sorrowfully, "and they are very
beautiful--_quite_ beautiful."

He turned to the path along which he had so recently led Marjorie.

He glanced back as they went along between Lady Petchworth's herbaceous
border and the poppy beds. "She's so full of life," he said, with a sigh
in his voice.

Mrs. Pope knew she must keep silent.

"I asked her to marry me this afternoon," Mr. Magnet blurted out. "I
couldn't help it."

Mrs. Pope made her silence very impressive.

"I know I ought not to have done so without consulting you"--he went on
lamely; "I'm very much in love with her. It's----It's done no harm."

Mrs. Pope's voice was soft and low. "I had no idea, Mr. Magnet.... You
know she is very young. Twenty. A mother----"

"I know," said Magnet. "I can quite understand. But I've done no harm.
She refused me. I shall go away to-morrow. Go right away for ever....
I'm sorry."

Another long silence.

"To me, of course, she's just a child," Mrs. Pope said at last. "She
_is_ only a child, Mr. Magnet. She could have had no idea that anything
of the sort was in your mind----"

Her words floated away into the stillness.

For a time they said no more. The lilies came into sight, dreaming under
a rich green shade on a limpid pool of brown water, water that slept and
brimmed over as it were, unconsciously into a cool splash and ripple of
escape. "How beautiful!" cried Mrs. Pope, for a moment genuine.

"I spoke to her here," said Mr. Magnet.

The fountains of his confidence were unloosed.

"Now I've spoken to you about it, Mrs. Pope," he said, "I can tell you
just how I--oh, it's the only word--adore her. She seems so sweet and
easy--so graceful----"

Mrs. Pope turned on him abruptly, and grasped his hands; she was deeply
moved. "I can't tell you," she said, "what it means to a mother to hear
such things----"

Words failed her, and for some moments they engaged in a mutual
pressure.

"Ah!" said Mr. Magnet, and had a queer wish it was the mother he had to
deal with.

"Are you sure, Mr. Magnet," Mrs. Pope went on as their emotions
subsided, "that she really meant what she said? Girls are very strange
creatures----"

"She seems so clear and positive."

"Her manner is always clear and positive."

"Yes. I know."

"I know she _has_ cared for you."

"No!"

"A mother sees. When your name used to be mentioned----. But these are
not things to talk about. There is something--something sacred----"

"Yes," he said. "Yes. Only----Of course, one thing----"

Mrs. Pope seemed lost in the contemplation of water-lilies.

"I wondered," said Mr. Magnet, and paused again.

Then, almost breathlessly, "I wondered if there should be perhaps--some
one else?"

She shook her head slowly. "I should know," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"I know I should know."

"Perhaps recently?"

"I am sure I should know. A mother's intuition----"

Memories possessed her for awhile. "A girl of twenty is a mass of
contradictions. I can remember myself as if it was yesterday. Often one
says no, or yes--out of sheer nervousness.... I am sure there is no
other attachment----"

It occurred to her that she had said enough. "What a dignity that old
gold-fish has!" she remarked. "He waves his tail--as if he were a beadle
waving little boys out of church."

Sec. 5

Mrs. Pope astonished Marjorie by saying nothing about the all too
obvious event of the day for some time, but her manner to her second
daughter on their way home was strangely gentle. It was as if she had
realized for the first time that regret and unhappiness might come into
that young life. After supper, however, she spoke. They had all gone out
just before the children went to bed to look for the new moon; Daffy was
showing the pseudo-twins the old moon in the new moon's arms, and
Marjorie found herself standing by her mother's side. "I hope dear,"
said Mrs. Pope, "that it's all for the best--and that you've done
wisely, dear."

Marjorie was astonished and moved by her mother's tone.

"It's so difficult to know what _is_ for the best," Mrs. Pope went on.

"I had to do--as I did," said Marjorie.

"I only hope you may never find you have made a Great Mistake, dear. He
cares for you very, very much."

"Oh! we see it now!" cried Rom, "we see it now! Mummy, have you seen it?
Like a little old round ghost being nursed!"

When Marjorie said "Good-night," Mrs. Pope kissed her with an
unaccustomed effusion.

It occurred to Marjorie that after all her mother had no selfish end to
serve in this affair.

Sec. 6

The idea that perhaps after all she had made a Great Mistake, the
Mistake of her Life it might be, was quite firmly established in its
place among all the other ideas in Marjorie's mind by the time she had
dressed next morning. Subsequent events greatly intensified this
persuasion. A pair of new stockings she had trusted sprang a bad hole as
she put them on. She found two unmistakable bills from Oxbridge beside
her plate, and her father was "horrid" at breakfast.

Her father, it appeared, had bought the ordinary shares of a Cuban
railway very extensively, on the distinct understanding that they would
improve. In a decent universe, with a proper respect for meritorious
gentlemen, these shares would have improved accordingly, but the weather
had seen fit to shatter the wisdom of Mr. Pope altogether. The sugar
crop had collapsed, the bears were at work, and every morning now saw
his nominal capital diminished by a dozen pounds or so. I do not know
what Mr. Pope would have done if he had not had his family to help him
bear his trouble. As it was he relieved his tension by sending Theodore
from the table for dropping a knife, telling Rom when she turned the
plate round to pick the largest banana that she hadn't the self-respect
of a child of five, and remarking sharply from behind the _Times_ when
Daffy asked Marjorie if she was going to sketch: "Oh, for God's sake
don't _whisper!_" Then when Mrs. Pope came round the table and tried to
take his coffee cup softly to refill it without troubling him, he
snatched at it, wrenched it roughly out of her hand, and said with his
mouth full, and strangely in the manner of a snarling beast: "No' ready
yet. Half foo'."

Marjorie wanted to know why every one didn't get up and leave the room.
She glanced at her mother and came near to speaking.

And very soon she would have to come home and live in the midst of this
again--indefinitely!

After breakfast she went to the tumbledown summer-house by the duckpond,
and contemplated the bills she had not dared to open at table. One was
boots, nearly three pounds, the other books, over seven. "I _know_
that's wrong," said Marjorie, and rested her chin on her hand, knitted
her brows and tried to remember the details of orders and deliveries....

Marjorie had fallen into the net prepared for our sons and daughters by
the delicate modesty of the Oxbridge authorities in money matters, and
she was, for her circumstances, rather heavily in debt. But I must admit
that in Marjorie's nature the Oxbridge conditions had found an eager and
adventurous streak that rendered her particularly apt to these
temptations.

I doubt if reticence is really a virtue in a teacher. But this is a
fearful world, and the majority of those who instruct our youth have the
painful sensitiveness of the cloistered soul to this spirit of terror in
things. The young need particularly to be told truthfully and fully all
we know of three fundamental things: the first of which is God, the
next their duty towards their neighbours in the matter of work and
money, and the third Sex. These things, and the adequate why of them,
and some sort of adequate how, make all that matters in education. But
all three are obscure and deeply moving topics, topics for which the
donnish mind has a kind of special ineptitude, and which it evades with
the utmost skill and delicacy. The middle part of this evaded triad was
now being taken up in Marjorie's case by the Oxbridge tradespeople.

The Oxbridge shopkeeper is peculiar among shopkeepers in the fact that
he has to do very largely with shy and immature customers with an
extreme and distinctive ignorance of most commercial things. They are
for the most part short of cash, but with vague and often large
probabilities of credit behind them, for most people, even quite
straitened people, will pull their sons and daughters out of altogether
unreasonable debts at the end of their university career; and so the
Oxbridge shopkeeper becomes a sort of propagandist of the charms and
advantages of insolvency. Alone among retailers he dislikes the sight of
cash, declines it, affects to regard it as a coarse ignorant truncation
of a budding relationship, begs to be permitted to wait. So the
youngster just up from home discovers that money may stay in the pocket,
be used for cab and train fares and light refreshments; all the rest may
be had for the asking. Marjorie, with her innate hunger for good fine
things, with her quite insufficient pocket-money, and the irregular
habits of expenditure a spasmodically financed, hard-up home is apt to
engender, fell very readily into this new, delightful custom of having
it put down (whatever it happened to be). She had all sorts of things
put down. She and the elder Carmel girl used to go shopping together,
having things put down. She brightened her rooms with colour-prints and
engravings, got herself pretty and becoming clothes, acquired a fitted
dressing-bag already noted in this story, and one or two other trifles
of the sort, revised her foot-wear, created a very nice little
bookshelf, and although at times she felt a little astonished and scared
at herself, resolutely refused to estimate the total of accumulated debt
she had attained. Indeed until the bills came in it was impossible to do
that, because, following the splendid example of the Carmel girl, she
hadn't even inquired the price of quite a number of things....

She didn't dare think now of the total. She lied even to herself about
that. She had fixed on fifty pounds as the unendurable maximum. "It is
less than fifty pounds," she said, and added: "_must_ be." But something
in her below the threshold of consciousness knew that it was more.

And now she was in her third year, and the Oxbridge tradesman, generally
satisfied with the dimensions of her account, and no longer anxious to
see it grow, was displaying the less obsequious side of his character.
He wrote remarks at the bottom of his account, remarks about settlement,
about having a bill to meet, about having something to go on with. He
asked her to give the matter her "early attention." She had a
disagreeable persuasion that if she wanted many more things anywhere she
would have to pay ready money for them. She was particularly short of
stockings. She had overlooked stockings recently.

Daffy, unfortunately, was also short of stockings.

And now, back with her family again, everything conspired to remind
Marjorie of the old stringent habits from which she had had so
delightful an interlude. She saw Daffy eye her possessions, reflect.
This morning something of the awfulness of her position came to her....

At Oxbridge she had made rather a joke of her debts.

"I'd _swear_ I haven't had three pairs of house shoes," said Marjorie.
"But what can one do?"

And about the whole position the question was, "what can one do?"

She proceeded with tense nervous movements to tear these two distasteful
demands into very minute pieces. Then she collected them all together in
the hollow of her hand, and buried them in the loose mould in a corner
of the summer-house.

"Madge," said Theodore, appearing in the sunshine of the doorway. "Aunt
Plessington's coming! She's sent a wire. Someone's got to meet her by
the twelve-forty train."

Sec. 7

Aunt Plessington's descent was due to her sudden discovery that
Buryhamstreet was in close proximity to Summerhay Park, indeed only
three miles away. She had promised a lecture on her movement for Lady
Petchworth's village room in Summerhay, and she found that with a slight
readjustment of dates she could combine this engagement with her
promised visit to her husband's sister, and an evening or so of
influence for her little Madge. So she had sent Hubert to telegraph at
once, and "here," she said triumphantly on the platform, after a hard
kiss at Marjorie's cheek, "we are again."

There, at any rate, she was, and Uncle Hubert was up the platform seeing
after the luggage, in his small anxious way.

Aunt Plessington was a tall lean woman, with firm features, a high
colour and a bright eye, who wore hats to show she despised them, and
carefully dishevelled hair. Her dress was always good, but extremely old
and grubby, and she commanded respect chiefly by her voice. Her voice
was the true governing-class voice, a strangulated contralto, abundant
and authoritative; it made everything she said clear and important, so
that if she said it was a fine morning it was like leaded print in the
_Times_, and she had over her large front teeth lips that closed quietly
and with a slight effort after her speeches, as if the words she spoke
tasted well and left a peaceful, secure sensation in the mouth.

Uncle Hubert was a less distinguished figure, and just a little
reminiscent of the small attached husbands one finds among the lower
crustacea: he was much shorter and rounder than his wife, and if he had
been left to himself, he would probably have been comfortably fat in his
quiet little way. But Aunt Plessington had made him a Haigite, which is
one of the fiercer kinds of hygienist, just in the nick of time. He had
round shoulders, a large nose, and glasses that made him look
astonished--and she said he had a great gift for practical things, and
made him see after everything in that line while she did the lecturing.
His directions to the porter finished, he came up to his niece. "Hello,
Marjorie!" he said, in a peculiar voice that sounded as though his mouth
was full (though of course, poor dear, it wasn't), "how's the First
Class?"

"A second's good enough for me, Uncle Hubert," said Marjorie, and asked
if they would rather walk or go in the donkey cart, which was waiting
outside with Daffy. Aunt Plessington, with an air of great _bonhomie_
said she'd ride in the donkey cart, and they did. But no pseudo-twins or
Theodore came to meet this arrival, as both uncle and aunt had a way of
asking how the lessons were getting on that they found extremely
disagreeable. Also, their aunt measured them, and incited them with loud
encouraging noises to grow one against the other in an urgent,
disturbing fashion.

Aunt Plessington's being was consumed by thoughts of getting on. She was
like Bernard Shaw's life force, and she really did not seem to think
there was anything in existence but shoving. She had no idea what a lark
life can be, and occasionally how beautiful it can be when you do not
shove, if only, which becomes increasingly hard each year, you can get
away from the shovers. She was one of an energetic family of eight
sisters who had maintained themselves against a mutual pressure by the
use of their elbows from the cradle. They had all married against each
other, all sorts of people; two had driven their husbands into
bishoprics and made quite typical bishop's wives, one got a leading
barrister, one a high war-office official, and one a rich Jew, and Aunt
Plessington, after spending some years in just missing a rich and only
slightly demented baronet, had pounced--it's the only word for it--on
Uncle Hubert. "A woman is nothing without a husband," she said, and took
him. He was a fairly comfortable Oxford don in his furtive way, and
bringing him out and using him as a basis, she specialized in
intellectual philanthropy and evolved her Movement. It was quite
remarkable how rapidly she overhauled her sisters again.

What the Movement was, varied considerably from time to time, but it was
always aggressively beneficial towards the lower strata of the
community. Among its central ideas was her belief that these lower
strata can no more be trusted to eat than they can to drink, and that
the licensing monopoly which has made the poor man's beer thick,
lukewarm and discreditable, and so greatly minimized its consumption,
should be extended to the solid side of his dietary. She wanted to place
considerable restrictions upon the sale of all sorts of meat, upon
groceries and the less hygienic and more palatable forms of bread (which
do not sufficiently stimulate the coatings of the stomach), to increase
the present difficulties in the way of tobacco purchasers, and to put an
end to that wanton and deleterious consumption of sweets which has so
bad an effect upon the enamel of the teeth of the younger generation.
Closely interwoven with these proposals was an adoption of the principle
of the East Purblow Experiment, the principle of Payment in Kind. She
was quite in agreement with Mr. Pope that poor people, when they had
money, frittered it away, and so she proposed very extensive changes in
the Truck Act, which could enable employers, under suitable safeguards,
and with the advice of a small body of spinster inspectors, to supply
hygienic housing, approved clothing of moral and wholesome sort, various
forms of insurance, edifying rations, cuisine, medical aid and
educational facilities as circumstances seemed to justify, in lieu of
the wages the employees handled so ill....

As no people in England will ever admit they belong to the lower strata
of society, Aunt Plessington's Movement attracted adherents from every
class in the community.

She now, as they drove slowly to the vicarage, recounted to
Marjorie--she had the utmost contempt for Daffy because of her irregular
teeth and a general lack of progressive activity--the steady growth of
the Movement, and the increasing respect shown for her and Hubert in the
world of politico-social reform. Some of the meetings she had addressed
had been quite full, various people had made various remarks about her,
hostile for the most part and yet insidiously flattering, and everybody
seemed quite glad to come to the little dinners she gave in order, she
said, to gather social support for her reforms. She had been staying
with the Mastersteins, who were keenly interested, and after she had
polished off Lady Petchworth she was to visit Lady Rosenbaum. It was all
going on swimmingly, these newer English gentry were eager to learn all
she had to teach in the art of breaking in the Anglo-Saxon villagers,
and now, how was Marjorie going on, and what was _she_ going to do in
the world?

Marjorie said she was working for her final.

"And what then?" asked Aunt Plessington.

"Not very clear, Aunt, yet."

"Looking around for something to take up?"

"Yes, Aunt."

"Well, you've time yet. And it's just as well to see how the land lies
before you begin. It saves going back. You'll have to come up to London
with me for a little while, and see things, and be seen a little."

"I should love to."

"I'll give you a good time," said Aunt Plessington, nodding promisingly.
"Theodore getting on in school?"

"He's had his remove."

"And how's Sydney getting on with the music?"

"Excellently."

"And Rom. Rom getting on?"

Marjorie indicated a more restrained success.

"And what's Daffy doing?"

"Oh! _get_ on!" said Daffy and suddenly whacked the donkey rather hard.
"I beg your pardon, Aunt?"

"I asked what _you_ were up to, Daffy?"

"Dusting, Aunt--and the virtues," said Daffy.

"You ought to find something better than that."

"Father tells me a lot about the East Purblow Experiment," said Daffy
after a perceptible interval.

"Ah!" cried Aunt Plessington with a loud encouraging note, but evidently
making the best of it, "_that's_ better. Sociological observation."

"Yes, Aunt," said Daffy, and negotiated a corner with exceptional care.

Sec. 8

Mrs. Pope, who had an instinctive disposition to pad when Aunt
Plessington was about, had secured the presence at lunch of Mr. Magnet
(who was after all staying on in Buryhamstreet) and the Rev. Jopling
Baynes. Aunt Plessington liked to meet the clergy, and would always if
she could win them over to an interest in the Movement. She opened the
meal with a brisk attack upon him. "Come, Mr. Baynes," she said, "what
do your people eat here? Hubert and I are making a study of the
gluttonous side of village life, and we find that no one knows so much
of that as the vicar--not even the doctor."

The Reverend Jopling Baynes was a clergyman of the evasive type with a
quite distinguished voice. He pursed his lips and made his eyes round.
"Well, Mrs. Plessington," he said and fingered his glass, "it's the
usual dietary. The usual dietary."

"Too much and too rich, badly cooked and eaten too fast," said Aunt
Plessington. "And what do you think is the remedy?"

"We make an Effort," said the Rev. Jopling Baynes, "we make an Effort. A
Hint here, a Word there."

"Nothing organized?"

"No," said the Rev. Jopling Baynes, and shook his head with a kind of
resignation.

"We are going to alter all that," said Aunt Plessington briskly, and
went on to expound the Movement and the diverse way in which it might be
possible to control and improve the domestic expenditure of the working
classes.

The Rev. Jopling Baynes listened sympathetically across the table and
tried to satisfy a healthy appetite with as abstemious an air as
possible while he did so. Aunt Plessington passed rapidly from general
principles, to a sketch of the success of the movement, and Hubert, who
had hitherto been busy with his lunch, became audible from behind the
exceptionally large floral trophy that concealed him from his wife,
bubbling confirmatory details. She was very bright and convincing as she
told of this prominent man met and subdued, that leading antagonist
confuted, and how the Bishops were coming in. She made it clear in her
swift way that an intelligent cleric resolved to get on in this world
_en route_ for a better one hereafter, might do worse than take up her
Movement. And this touched in, she turned her mind to Mr. Magnet.

(That floral trophy, I should explain, by the by, was exceptionally
large because of Mrs. Pope's firm conviction that Aunt Plessington
starved her husband. Accordingly, she masked him, and so was able to
heap second and third helpings upon his plate without Aunt Plessington
discovering his lapse. The avidity with which Hubert ate confirmed her
worst suspicions and evinced, so far as anything ever did evince, his
gratitude.)

"Well, Mr. Magnet," she said, "I wish I had your sense of humour."

"I wish you had," said Mr. Magnet.

"I should write tracts," said Aunt Plessington.

"I knew it was good for something," said Mr. Magnet, and Daffy laughed
in a tentative way.

"I mean it," said Aunt Plessington brightly. "Think if we had a
Dickens--and you are the nearest man alive to Dickens--on the side of
social reform to-day!"

Mr. Magnet's light manner deserted him. "We do what we can, Mrs.
Plessington," he said.

"How much more might be done," said Aunt Plessington, "if humour could
be organized."

"Hear, hear!" said Mr. Pope.

"If all the humorists of England could be induced to laugh at something
together."

"They do--at times," said Mr. Magnet, but the atmosphere was too serious
for his light touch.

"They could laugh it out of existence," said Aunt Plessington.

It was evident Mr. Magnet was struck by the idea.

"Of course," he said, "in _Punch_, to which I happen to be an obscure
occasional contributor----"

Mrs. Pope was understood to protest that he should not say such things.

"We _do_ remember just what we can do either in the way of advertising
or injury. I don't think you'll find us up against any really _solid_
institutions."

"But do you think, Mr. Magnet, you are sufficiently kind to the New?"
Aunt Plessington persisted.

"I think we are all grateful to _Punch_," said the Rev. Jopling Baynes
suddenly and sonorously, "for its steady determination to direct our
mirth into the proper channels. I do not think that any one can accuse
its editor of being unmindful of his great responsibilities----"

Marjorie found it a very interesting conversation.

She always met her aunt again with a renewal of a kind of admiration.
That loud authoritative rudeness, that bold thrusting forward of the
Movement until it became the sole criterion of worth or success, this
annihilation by disregard of all that Aunt Plessington wasn't and didn't
and couldn't, always in the intervals seemed too good to be true. Of
course this really was the way people got on and made a mark, but she
felt it must be almost as trying to the nerves as aeronautics. Suppose,
somewhere up there your engine stopped! How Aunt Plessington dominated
the table! Marjorie tried not to catch Daffy's eye. Daffy was
unostentatiously keeping things going, watching the mustard, rescuing
the butter, restraining Theodore, and I am afraid not listening very
carefully to Aunt Plessington. The children were marvellously silent and
jumpily well-behaved, and Mr. Pope, in a very unusual state of subdued
amiability, sat at the end of the table with the East Purblow experiment
on the tip of his tongue. He liked Aunt Plessington, and she was good
for him. They had the same inherent distrust of the intelligence and
good intentions of their fellow creatures, and she had the knack of
making him feel that he too was getting on, that she was saying things
on his behalf in influential quarters, and in spite of the almost
universal conspiracy (based on jealousy) to ignore his stern old-world
virtues, he might still be able to battle his way to the floor of the
House of Commons and there deliver himself before he died of a few
sorely needed home-truths about motor cars, decadence and frivolity
generally....

Sec. 9

After lunch Aunt Plessington took her little Madge for an energetic
walk, and showed herself far more observant than the egotism of her
conversation at that meal might have led one to suppose. Or perhaps she
was only better informed. Aunt Plessington loved a good hard walk in the
afternoon; and if she could get any one else to accompany her, then
Hubert stayed at home, and curled up into a ball on a sofa somewhere,
and took a little siesta that made him all the brighter for the
intellectual activities of the evening. The thought of a young life,
new, untarnished, just at the outset, just addressing itself to the task
of getting on, always stimulated her mind extremely, and she talked to
Marjorie with a very real and effectual desire to help her to the utmost
of her ability.

She talked of a start in life, and the sort of start she had had. She
showed how many people who began with great advantages did not shove
sufficiently, and so dropped out of things and weren't seen and
mentioned. She defended herself for marrying Hubert, and showed what a
clever shoving thing it had been to do. It startled people a little, and
made them realize that here was a woman who wanted something more in a
man than a handsome organ-grinder. She made it clear that she thought a
clever marriage, if not a startlingly brilliant one, the first duty of a
girl. It was a girl's normal gambit. She branched off to the things
single women might do, in order to justify this view. She did not think
single women could do very much. They might perhaps shove as
suffragettes, but even there a husband helped tremendously--if only by
refusing to bail you out. She ran over the cases of a number of
prominent single women.

"And what," said Aunt Plessington, "do they all amount to? A girl is so
hampered and an old maid is so neglected," said Aunt Plessington.

She paused.

"Why don't you up and marry Mr. Magnet, Marjorie?" she said, with her
most brilliant flash.

"It takes two to make a marriage, aunt," said Marjorie after a slight
hesitation.

"My dear child! he worships the ground you tread on!" said Aunt
Plessington.

"He's rather--grown up," said Marjorie.

"Not a bit of it. He's not forty. He's just the age."

"I'm afraid it's a little impossible."

"Impossible?"

"You see I've refused him, aunt."

"Naturally--the first time! But I wouldn't send him packing the second."

There was an interval.

Marjorie decided on a blunt question. "Do you really think, aunt, I
should do well to marry Mr. Magnet?"

"He'd give you everything a clever woman needs," said Aunt Plessington.
"Everything."

With swift capable touches she indicated the sort of life the future
Mrs. Magnet might enjoy. "He's evidently a man who wants helping to a
position," she said. "Of course his farces and things, I'm told, make no
end of money, but he's just a crude gift by himself. Money like that is
nothing. With a clever wife he might be all sorts of things. Without one
he'll just subside--you know the sort of thing this sort of man does. A
rather eccentric humorous house in the country, golf, croquet,
horse-riding, rose-growing, queer hats."

"Isn't that rather what he would like to do, aunt?" said Marjorie.

"That's not _our_ business, Madge," said Aunt Plessington with humorous
emphasis.

She began to sketch out a different and altogether smarter future for
the fortunate humorist. There would be a house in a good central
position in London where Marjorie would have bright successful lunches
and dinners, very unpretending and very good, and tempt the clever smart
with the lure of the interestingly clever; there would be a bright
little country cottage in some pretty accessible place to which Aunt and
Uncle Plessington and able and influential people generally could be
invited for gaily recreative and yet extremely talkative and helpful
week-ends. Both places could be made centres of intrigue; conspiracies
for getting on and helping and exchanging help could be organized,
people could be warned against people whose getting-on was undesirable.
In the midst of it all, dressed with all the natural wit she had and an
enlarging experience, would be Marjorie, shining like a rising planet.
It wouldn't be long, if she did things well, before she had permanent
officials and young cabinet ministers mingling with her salad of writers
and humorists and the Plessington connexion.

"Then," said Aunt Plessington with a joyous lift in her voice, "you'll
begin to _weed_ a little."

For a time the girl's mind resisted her.

But Marjorie was of the impressionable sex at an impressionable age, and
there was something overwhelming in the undeviating conviction of her
aunt, in the clear assurance of her voice, that this life which
interested her was the real life, the only possible successful life. The
world reformed itself in Marjorie's fluent mind, until it was all a
scheme of influence and effort and ambition and triumphs. Dinner-parties
and receptions, men wearing orders, cabinet ministers more than a little
in love asking her advice, beautiful robes, a great blaze of lights;
why! she might be, said Aunt Plessington rising to enthusiasm, "another
Marcella." The life was not without its adventurous side; it wasn't in
any way dull. Aunt Plessington to illustrate that point told amusing
anecdotes of how two almost impudent invitations on her part had
succeeded, and how she had once scored off her elder sister by getting a
coveted celebrity through their close family resemblance. "After
accepting he couldn't very well refuse because I wasn't somebody else,"
she ended gleefully. "So he came--and stayed as long as anybody."

What else was there for Marjorie to contemplate? If she didn't take this
by no means unattractive line, what was the alternative? Some sort of
employment after a battle with her father, a parsimonious life, and even
then the Oxbridge tradesmen and their immortal bills....

Aunt Plessington was so intent upon her theme that she heeded nothing of
the delightful little flowers she trampled under foot across the down,
nor the jolly squirrel with an artistic temperament who saw fit to give
an uninvited opinion upon her personal appearance from the security of a
beech-tree in the wood. But Marjorie, noting quite a number of such
things with the corner of her mind, and being now well under the
Plessington sway, wished she had more concentration....

In the evening after supper the customary games were suspended, and Mr.
and Mrs. Plessington talked about getting on, and work and efficiency
generally, and explained how so-and-so had spoilt his chances in life,
and why so-and-so was sure to achieve nothing, and how this man ate too
much and that man drank too much, and on the contrary what promising and
capable people the latest adherents of and subscribers to the Movement
were, until two glasses of hot water came--Aunt Plessington had been
told it was good for her digestion and she thought it just as well that
Hubert should have some too--and it was time for every one to go to bed.

Sec. 10

Next morning an atmosphere of getting on and strenuosity generally
prevailed throughout the vicarage. The Plessingtons were preparing a
memorandum on their movement for the "Reformer's Year Book," every word
was of importance and might win or lose adherents and subscribers, and
they secured the undisturbed possession of the drawing-room, from which
the higher notes of Aunt Plessington's voice explaining the whole thing
to Hubert, who had to write it out, reached, a spur to effort, into
every part of the house.

Their influence touched every one.

Marjorie, struck by the idea that she was not perhaps getting on at
Oxbridge so fast as she ought to do, went into the summer-house with
Marshall's "Principles of Economics," read for two hours, and did not
think about her bills for more than a quarter of the time. Rom, who had
already got up early and read through about a third of "Aurora Leigh,"
now set herself with dogged determination to finish that great poem. Syd
practised an extra ten minutes--for Aunt Plessington didn't mind
practice so long as there wasn't a tune. Mrs. Pope went into the kitchen
and made a long-needed fuss about the waste of rice. Mr. Pope began the
pamphlet he had had in contemplation for some time upon the advantages
to public order of Payment in Kind. Theodore, who had washed behind his
ears and laced his boots in all the holes, went into the yard before
breakfast and hit a tennis ball against the wall and back, five hundred
and twenty-two times--a record. He would have resumed this after
breakfast, but his father came round the corner of the house with a pen
in his mouth, and asked him indistinctly, but fiercely, what the _devil_
he was doing. So he went away, and after a fretful interval set himself
to revise his Latin irregular verbs. By twelve he had done wonders.

Later in the day the widening circle of aggressive urgency reached the
kitchen, and at two the cook gave notice in order, she said, to better
herself.

Lunch, unconscious of this impending shadow, was characterized by a
virtuous cheerfulness, and Aunt Plessington told in detail how her seven
and twenty nephews and nieces, the children of her various sisters, were
all getting on. On the whole, they were not getting on so brilliantly as
they might have done (which indeed is apt to be the case with the
children of people who have loved not well but too wisely), and it was
borne in upon the mind of the respectfully listening Marjorie that, to
borrow an easy colloquialism of her aunt's, she might "take the shine
out of the lot of them" with a very little zeal and effort--and of
course Mr. Magnet.

The lecture in the evening at Summerhay was a great success.

The chair was taken by the Rev. Jopling Baynes, Lady Petchworth was
enthroned behind the table, Hubert was in charge of his wife's notes--if
notes should be needed--and Mr. Pope, expectant of an invitation at the
end to say a few words about the East Purblow experiment, also occupied
a chair on the platform. Lady Petchworth, with her abundant soft blond
hair, brightly blond still in spite of her fifty-five years, her
delicate features, her plump hands, her numerous chins and her entirely
inaudible voice, made a pleasing contrast with Aunt Plessington's
resolute personality. She had perhaps an even greater assurance of
authority, but it was a quiet assurance; you felt that she knew that if
she spoke in her sleep she would be obeyed, that it was quite
unnecessary to make herself heard. The two women, indeed, the one so
assertive, the other so established, were at the opposite poles of
authoritative British womanhood, and harmonized charmingly. The little
room struck the note of a well-regulated brightness at every point, it
had been decorated in a Keltic but entirely respectful style by one of
Lady Petchworth's artistic discoveries, it was lit by paraffin lamps
that smelt hardly at all, and it was gay with colour prints illustrating
the growth of the British Empire from the battle of Ethandune to the
surrender of Cronje. The hall was fairly full. Few could afford to
absent themselves from these brightening occasions, but there was a
tendency on the part of the younger and the less thoughtful section of
the village manhood to accumulate at the extreme back and rumble in what
appeared to be a slightly ironical spirit, so far as it had any spirit

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.