Читать книгу Miss Bunting - Angela Thirkell - Страница 4

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Sir Robert Fielding, Chancellor to the Diocese of Barchester, had a very handsome house in the Cathedral Close next to the Deanery, and before the war only made use of Hall's End, his charming little stone house in Hallbury, as a villegiatura, or as a convenient residence for his only child Anne who had perpetual chests and coughs and colds in Barchester; for the houses on the Deanery side of the close are very little above river level and for the greater part of the year have a tendency to damp, while a winter rarely passes without the river coming into the cellars. Indeed in the winter of 1939-40, as our readers will not remember (and we have had the greatest difficulty in running the reference to earth ourselves), rumour had it that the flood carried the Bishop's second-best gaiters as far as old Canon Thorne's front doorstep; and as the Bishop had accused the Canon, who was extremely popular, of Mariolatry, everyone hoped it was true.

In spite of all that care and money could do, Anne Fielding was still an anxiety to her parents. Dr. Ford, who had known her all her life, still maintained that two or three winters in a warm dry climate would do the trick, but this was out of the question, so Anne continued to lead a contented but rather remote life, going to Barchester High School when she was well enough. About a year before this unpretentious narrative begins, being then sixteen, she had had to register under the Registration of Boys and Girls Act which frightened her parents a good deal, but Dr. Ford, who knew the Labour Exchange people very well, and had been of considerable assistance to them in one way and another by refusing to give medical certificates to various would-be exempteds (notably in the case of the Communist hairdresser with fine physique and no dependants, in the winter of 1940-1), told them that no Labour Exchange would even look at Anne. This was doubtful comfort, but her parents took it in the best spirit and retained a firm faith that as soon as the war was over they would take her to the Riviera, or even to Arizona if necessary, and see her make a complete recovery.

The question of Anne's further education also occupied their minds. As the war went on it was evident that she could no longer go to the High School, which was crowded to bursting point and though an excellent school, no place for a semi-invalid. Her parents, both extremely busy people, enmeshed in really valuable war work as well as their ordinary work, were at their wit's end. If it was a case of dire necessity Lady Fielding could give up everything and live at Hallbury: but she knew it would not be a success. She would be too anxious about Anne and Anne not quite at her ease with her. Then, by a great piece of luck, Lady Fielding happened to mention her difficulties to Mrs. Marling of Marling Hall after a W.V.S. meeting in Barchester. Mrs. Marling had sympathized and looked thoughtful. As they stood talking outside the Town Hall a car stopped beside them, driven by a commanding young woman in Red Cross uniform.

"You know my girl Lucy, I think," said Mrs. Marling. "She is going abroad with her Red Cross next month. Lucy, Lady Fielding doesn't know what to do about Anne. She gets too tired at the High School and Dr. Ford says she must stay at Hallbury. It's all very awkward."

"I'll tell you what," said Lucy Marling, who was obviously going to stand no nonsense from anyone. "Why can't Bunny go to Lady Fielding for a bit? Now Lettice and the children are in Yorkshire she can't even pretend she's governessing."

Now Bunny was Miss Bunting, an elderly ex-governess of high reputation, who had taught Mrs. Marling and her brothers in their schoolroom days, and had come as an honoured and very useful refugee to Marling Hall soon after the outbreak of war. Mrs. Marling, a very practical woman of swift decisions, was struck by her daughter Lucy's suggestion and asked Lady Fielding to meet Miss Bunting.

The upshot was that Miss Bunting consented, with her own peculiar mixture of gratitude and independence, to come to Hallbury for an unspecified length of time to keep an eye on Anne's health and wellbeing, and to assist her in her studies; the whole for a very generous stipend.

We doubt if even Miss Bunting, for all her practical sense and power of organizing, could have run a house in Hallbury in war-time, but that Lady Fielding had already found and installed a Mixo-Lydian refugee recommended by Mrs. Perry, the doctor's wife at Harefield. She was an unusually plain and unattractive young woman of dwarfish and lumpish stature, with manners that struck an odious note between cringing and arrogance, named Gradka. As for her surname, it had so often been rehearsed and so often found impossible to say or to memorize that no one bothered about it. Gradka was studying with all her might to pass the Society for the Propagation of English examination by correspondence course, and had already successfully tackled several subjects. When Lady Fielding discovered this she was anxious, feeling that the housework and food might suffer, but to the credit of Mixo-Lydia it must at once be said that Gradka did the housework and cooking excellently and never wanted holidays, because she barely tolerated the English and actively disliked all her fellow Mixo-Lydian refugees.

Miss Bunting came to Hallbury with Lady Fielding to inspect her new domain, and in one interview reduced Gradka to a state of subservience which roused Lady Fielding's admiration and curiosity.

"How did you do it?" she asked Miss Bunting subsequently, awestruck.

"I was in Russia before the last war with a daughter of one of the Grand Dukes," said Miss Bunting. "The Russian aristocracy knew how to treat their inferiors. I observed their methods and have practised them with some success."

"But you can't exactly call Gradka inferior," said Lady Fielding, nervously wondering whether she was listening outside the door. "Her father is a university professor and very well known."

"I think," said Miss Bunting, "that you will find the facts much overstated. The young woman, who is probably listening outside the door at the moment, is an inferior. No wellborn Mixo-Lydian would dream of being connected with a university. Until this war they kept up the habits of a real aristocracy: to hunt and get drunk all autumn and winter, and to go to the Riviera and get drunk in the spring and early summer. For the rest of the year they visited their palaces in Lydianopolis where they entertained ballet girls and got drunk."

Whether Gradka overheard this or not, we cannot say, but from that moment she recognized Miss Bunting as a princess and the household went very well, with excellent cooking, and Anne, in her governess's firm and competent hands, looked better and felt happier. That her charge was grossly uneducated was at once evident to Miss Bunting, who had no opinion at all of Barchester High School and its headmistress Miss Pettinger (now by a just judgment of heaven an O.B.E.), and a very poor opinion of the whole system of women's education and the School Certificate examination in particular. It was too late to go back to the beginning, as she would have liked to do, so she contented herself with encouraging her pupil to read. Anne, like so many young people of her age, even with a cultivated background, had somehow never acquired the habit of reading, but Miss Bunting, by reading aloud to her in the evenings from the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Austen and other English classics, besides a good deal of poetry, had lighted such a candle as caused that excellent instructress to wonder if she had done wisely. For Anne, a very intelligent girl who had never used her intelligence, fell head over ears into English literature and history, and made excursions into many other fields. Never had Miss Bunting in her long career had a pupil who had tasted honeydew with such vehemence, or drunk the milk of Paradise with such deep breaths and loud gulps; but it didn't appear to do Anne's health any harm, so the two of them had a very agreeable time in spite of the war, the weather and their rather lonely life; for though the Fieldings were liked in Hallbury, they were not natives, as were the Pallisers and the Dales; and were still treated with caution by most of the old inhabitants.

Pleasant exceptions to this were Admiral Palliser who had known Lady Fielding's family well, and Dr. Dale, the Rector, who after paying a parochial call upon Miss Bunting had conceived the greatest admiration for her peculiar qualities, and talked books and families with her by the hour, which was a good education for Anne; for say what you will, to know who is whose mother-in-law or cousin among what we shall continue to call the right people is as fascinating as relativity and much more useful, besides being a small part of English, or at any rate county history. His son Robin too, back from the wars with his shattered foot, found in Anne another human being who was handicapped physically, and though neither of them complained, each recognized in the other, inarticulately, a disability which had to be fought and as far as possible overcome. With Dr. Dale Anne also began to read some Latin as a living language, and when her father approached with nervous determination the question of pay for his instruction (for Dr. Dale was a good scholar and his articles in the Journal of Classical Studies were models of precise thought), Dr. Dale accepted his wages and put them aside for Robin's benefit.

As may be imagined, Miss Anne Fielding, now nearly seventeen years old, had not seen much of life in the way of parties, so the thought of Admiral Palliser and Mrs. Gresham and Dr. Dale and Robin Dale, all of whom she saw quite often, coming to dine was so exciting as to make her feel rather sick. To add to the excitement her father and mother, who usually only got down from Saturday to Monday, were going to stay at Hall's End for a whole week and Mrs. Morland was coming, and Anne wondered if it would be rude to ask her to write her name in her latest novel which Anne had bought with her own money, or rather with a book token given to her by a dull aunt. Gradka was also excited, for she was going to make a Mixo-Lydian national dish for dinner which needed sour milk; and what with milk rationing and the difficulties of keeping what milk could be spared till it was exactly of the right degree of sourness, she got a good deal behindhand with her work, which was to write an essay about the influence of Hudibras upon English comic rhyming, as exemplified in Byron, the Ingoldsby Legends and the lyrics of W. S. Gilbert. And how Mixo-Lydians could be expected to write such an essay we do not know, but write it she did, and got very good marks: probably because the examiner had just about as little real sense of humour as the examinee.

The great Wednesday dawned as grey and blustery as all other days, but the east had gone out of the wind, which was veering, with many capricious rushings back to find something it had forgotten, through north into north-west. By noon it was a mild summer breeze and great loose clouds were billowing away to the south-east, leaving a blue and not unkind sky. By one o'clock it was almost warm, and on the south side of the house really warm. Gradka was in a frenzy of preparation which included decorating the dinner-table with trails of leaves from the outdoor vine. This vine, popularly supposed to be coeval with "the monks" (a date embracing practically everything between St. Augustine's conversion of Kent and the Reformation), grew against the south wall of the house and brought forth in most years rather lopsided bunches of little hard green grapes which occasionally under the influence of an exceptional summer turned purplish, but were none the less sour and unwelcoming, while this year, the weather having been uniformly not only cold but very dry, the miserable grapelets had withered and fallen almost as soon as they formed.

Here, to leave the field clearer for their staff's activities, Miss Bunting and Anne ate a frugal but sufficient lunch of a nice bit of cold fat bacon, salad from the garden, baked potatoes with marge (an underbred word, but it has come to stay) and some very good cold pudding left over from the night before. While they ate they talked of the party, and Miss Bunting watched complacently her pupil's happy anticipation of what a year ago would have made her so nervous that she would probably have run a temperature.

Owing largely to her poor health, Anne was still immature compared with most of her contemporaries. At present her nose was a little too aquiline for her young face, her hands and feet though well-shaped too apt to dangle like a marionette's and her body seemed to consist largely of shoulder blades. But Miss Bunting's Eye, in its great experience and wisdom, knew that if things went well her pupil would, at nineteen or twenty, be a very much improved creature; that her face would fill out and her nose appear in scale, her hands and feet would be brought into obedience and co-ordination, and her figure be very elegant. In fact, she would be a handsome young woman, very like her father, though Sir Robert's leonine head was rather large for his body; and that Anne's head would not be, said Miss Bunting to herself, defying any unseen power to contradict her.

"Miss Bunting," said Anne after a silence, during which the governess had been thinking the thoughts we have just described. "Do you know who I think you are like?"

Miss Bunting ran rapidly through, in her mind, a few famous governesses: Madame de Maintenon, Madame de Genlis, Madame de la Rougierre, Miss Weston, the Good French Governess, Jane Eyre: but to none of these characters could she flatter herself that she had the least resemblance. So she said she could not guess.

"I think," said Anne, her large grey eyes lighting as she spoke, "that you are like the Abbé Faria."

Even Miss Bunting, the imperturbable, the omniscient, was taken aback. For the life of her she could not place the Abbé. Meredith's Farina dashed wildly across her mind, but she dismissed it coldly. No, think as she would, the right echo could not sound.

"Because," continued Anne, pursuing her own train of thought, "I really was a kind of prisoner and getting so stupid and you did rescue me in a sort of way. I mean telling me about books and about how to write to Lady Pomfret or the Dean if I had to--oh and heaps of things. I don't mean making a tunnel really of course."

Light dawned upon Miss Bunting. Finding that Anne's book French was pretty good she had turned her loose on the immortal works of Dumas père: that is to say, on about ten per cent of his inexhaustible and uneven output. And this was the result of Monte Cristo.

"What would you do if you were really in a dungeon, Miss Bunting?" said Anne, who was evidently examining the whole subject seriously.

"I should use my intelligence," said Miss Bunting, and there is no doubt that she meant this.

"I expect you'd unravel your stockings and make a rope and strangle the jailer and dress up in his clothes," said Anne, gazing with reverent confidence at her governess.

Miss Bunting did not in the least regret having led her young charge into the enchanted world of fiction, but she certainly had not bargained for this very personal application of the life story of Edmond Dantes and found herself--a thing which had very rarely occurred in her life--quite at a loss. So she said Anne had better finish her lunch so that Gradka could get on with her work.

The beginning of Anne's exciting party was to go down to the station to meet her parents who were coming by the one good afternoon train which runs from Barchester to Silverbridge on Wednesdays only, getting to Hallbury in time for tea. As Wednesday is early closing in Barchester, it is useless for shoppers besides being too early for business people. We can only account for this by guessing it to be the remains of the system by which the railway companies had got their own back on such parts of England as had stood out against their coming.

This expedition she was to undertake alone, as Miss Bunting always disappeared from two to four, when according to the belief of all her friends, though they had no ocular proof of it, she took out her teeth, removed her false front and reposed upon her bed with a hot-water bottle to her respected toes. Anne also was supposed to rest after lunch, but Miss Bunting in her wisdom had relaxed this rule as the year advanced, and her charge's health had improved. Accordingly Anne, too excited to try to rest, betook herself to the kitchen where she was allowed to help Gradka by reading the Ingoldsby Legends aloud to her while she got the vegetables ready, Gradka interrupting from time to time with questions of an intelligent stupidity which Anne found rather difficult to answer.

"There is overheadly," said Gradka, "something that I should like to understand, which is namely the lines,

In vain did St. Dunstan exclaim, 'Vade retro Smallbeerum! discede a layfratre Petro,'

which to me is incorrect. Or perhaps it is doggish-Latin, yes?"

Anne, who was laughing so much that she had hardly been able to communicate the words of St. Dunstan, said she thought it was meant to be funny: a kind of parody of the kind of Latin the monks spoke, she supposed.

"Aha! parody!" said Gradka. "Then do I understand perfectly. The author wishes to make a laughable imitation of the mon-kish Latin, and smallbeerum is the accusative of a jocular form of small beer. That is highly amusing. Please go on, Prodshkina Anna," for, as our readers have quite forgotten, Prodshk and Prodshka are the Mixo-Lydian names for Mr. and Mrs. (or possibly Count and Countess, for nobody knows or cares), and thus Prodshkina is probably equivalent to Mademoiselle; or so Mrs. Perry said, whether anyone was listening or not.

So Anne, impeded by giggles, read to the end of that moral work and then went down to the station. In her anxiety to miss nothing of the treat she arrived a quarter of an hour too early, so she went up the stairs onto the footbridge and had a good look up and down the line, which here runs in a dead straight line through a cutting for two miles in the Silverbridge direction, finally vanishing into a tunnel, and is often used for testing engines. In the far distance a puff of dirty smoke appeared, followed at a short interval by a distant rumble, and a very long goods train came out of the tunnel and clanked towards her. There is to all ages a fearful fascination in standing on a bridge while a train goes under it. The poor quality of war-time coal has considerably lessened this attraction for those of riper years, but to Anne the sulphurous stench, the choking thick smoke were still romantic. Just as the engine was nearly under her, a voice remarked:

"Rum, how those Yank engines keep all their machinery outside, like Puffing Billy."

Anne looked round and saw Robin Dale.

"Hullo, Robin," she said. "I didn't know it was American."

Robin began to explain that our allies were lending us railway engines, but the noise of engine, trucks and ear-splitting whistle made it impossible to hear, so Anne shook her head violently. When the train had got through the station she turned to Robin and said: "I love watching trains come under the bridge. It makes me feel like Lady Godiva."

"And might one ask why?" said Robin, "especially in view of an almost total wacancy of the kind of hair needed for the part?"

Anne's grey eyes gleamed in appreciation of Robin's Dickens phraseology and she said, seriously, "I mean the beginning;

'I waited for the train at Coventry.'"

"Well, I always thought that half my intellect had gone with my foot," said Robin, "and now I know it."

"It's Tennyson," said Anne, with an anxious look at him, fearing that she had said something silly.

"Then I must read him," said Robin.

"Haven't you ever?" said Anne, incredulous. "Oh Robin, you must."

"Well, I have and I haven't," said Robin. "When you are as old as I am you will despise him: and when I am twenty years older I shall read him again like anything and love a lot of him as much as you do. I promise you that. I've got a nasty bit of ground to get over--disillusionment and so on--but I'll meet you again on the other side."

Robin was talking half to himself, finding Anne as he often had in the past years a help to self-examination. Sometimes he told himself that he was a selfish beast to use that Fielding child (for as such his lofty twenty-six years looked on her) as a safety-valve. But having thus made confession to himself he considered the account squared and again made her the occasional awestruck recipient of his reflections on life.

"Well, I must go and see about a parcel from Barchester that hasn't turned up," said Robin. "Are you coming down?"

"Not your side," said Anne. "I'm meeting mummy and daddy's train."

"Goodbye then till this evening," said Robin and went downstairs again towards the parcels office.

Shortly after this the Silverbridge train was signalled, and after what seemed to Anne an endless wait, came puffing round the curve and into the station. Whenever Anne met a train she wondered if the people she was meeting would really come by it. So far they always had and to-day was no exception for out of it came her father and mother, delighted to see her, ready to hug and be hugged. In happy pre-war days the footbridge at Hallbury had been within the platform railings, though open to all, but so much cheating had there been that the authorities had been obliged to put a new railing and gate to make it impossible for people to get into a train without a ticket. At the gate a little crowd was waiting for Godwin the porter, who was always doing something on the up platform when the down train came in, to come and let them loose. Anne noticed a large heavily built man in a suit which looked too new and too expensive, who was steadily squeezing his way to the front. The man saw her parents, sketched a kind of greeting, gave up his ticket and got into a waiting taxi. The Fieldings then gave Godwin their tickets and went out of the gate and over the bridge.

"Who was that man that knew you, daddy?" said Anne, as they walked up the hill. "That rather enormous one."

"A man called Adams," said Sir Robert. "He owns those big engineering works at Hogglestock. I came across him last year when he insisted on being a benefactor to the Cathedral."

"But you like benefactors, don't you?" said Anne.

"Within measure, within measure," said Sir Robert. "But he gave so large a sum that even the Dean was a little embarrassed. He fears that Adams will want to put up a window to his wife and that would not do at all."

Anne asked why.

"It is rather difficult to explain these things," said Sir Robert, who though he thoroughly believed in class distinctions to a certain extent, felt he ought not to influence his daughter.

"I suppose it might be rather an awful window," said Anne thoughtfully. "Oh, mummy! Gradka is making a perfectly lovely pudding with sour milk, and Miss Bunting and I had our lunch under the vine to-day, and Miss Bunting had a letter from one of her old pupils called David Leslie and he says it is very wet where he is."

Sir Robert and his wife heaved a silent sigh of relief. That any window given by Mr. Adams would be quite out of place in the Cathedral they had no doubt, even as they had no doubt that his benefactions were his protest against E.P.T.; but chiefly did they wish not to become socially embroiled with that gentleman who, finding that they had an only daughter, had talked a good deal of his own, now in her last term at the Hosiers' Girls' Foundation School, temporarily housed at Harefield Park.

"I'll carry your suitcase, mummy," said Anne, gently but forcibly wresting it from her mother's grasp. It was only a small affair, for the Fieldings kept at Hall's End such clothes as would be useful and only brought a few extras with them when they came.

"Carefully then," said Lady Fielding. "There's something in it for you," which made Anne flush with pleasure.

When they got to Hall's End they found Miss Bunting in the drawing-room and tea spread.

"Anne, dear," said Miss Bunting, "will you get the teapot from the kitchen and the hot-water jug. Gradka," she explained to her employers, "does not wish to be seen till after dinner, when she says she will come in and receive the compliments of your guests before she begins her evening studies. It is, I understand, a Mixo-Lydian custom."

"I can't say that I'll miss her," said Sir Robert, who liked those about him to be pleasant to the eye. "I've never been in Mixo-Lydia, and if they are all like that I hope never to go."

"Robert!" said his wife anxiously, for she had an amiable though often embarrassing weakness for oppressed nationalities and was afraid that Gradka, busy in the kitchen at the other end of the house, might hear her husband's words and give notice. Then Anne came back with the teapot and hot-water jug on a tray and they talked comfortably. Presently Lady Fielding went up to her room with Anne and there unpacked her little suitcase and showed her daughter a charming flowery silk dress exquisitely folded in pre-war tissue paper.

"Oh, mummy!" said Anne, "for me? Oh, how did you do it?"

"I found this silk in the cupboard in the sewing-room," said Lady Fielding. "I had quite forgotten it. So I took it to Madame Tomkins and asked her if she had your measurements and she looked at me with great contempt and said: 'Je connais par coeur le corps de Mademoiselle Anne,' which frightened me so much that I went away."

"She wouldn't have taken any notice of you if you'd stayed, mummy," said Anne. "Mummy, do you think that Madame Tomkins is really French? It doesn't sound French."

But Lady Fielding said she knew she was, because she remembered how Tomkins, the boot and knife man at the Palace, had brought back his French wife after the last war and had shortly afterwards disappeared.

"Had she murdered him, mummy?" said Anne, hopefully.

Lady Fielding said: Oh no, but she had a frightful temper and Tomkins had gone to New Zealand and was doing very well there and sent Madame Tomkins a card with a kiwi on it every Christmas.

"And now I think you had better rest before dinner, darling," said Lady Fielding, with solicitous care for her daughter.

"Oh, mummy, I hardly ever rest now except after lunch," said Anne, and she looked so well and seemed so happy, her mother agreed.

The next two excitements of the day for Anne were rather badly timed, for if she went to the station to meet Mrs. Morland, which she had very daringly thought of doing, she would have to hurry to put her new frock on afterwards: and if she put her new frock on first she could not go and meet Mrs. Morland. From this dilemma, which had made her quite pale with agitation, she was rescued by her father calling her to walk round the garden with him. So they walked, and then sat in the evening sun, while Anne prattled about her work and her reading, and was altogether such an alive and eager creature that her father felt very grateful to Miss Bunting, the author of the improvement. So pleasant in fact a time did they have, that when Sir Robert looked at his watch and said it was seven o'clock, both were surprised. Anne fled upstairs to put on her new dress, and so much enjoyed herself peacocking before her mother's long mirror that when at last she went downstairs, Mrs. Morland had already arrived and was having a gentlemanly glass of pre-war sherry with Sir Robert and Lady Fielding.

What Anne expected a well-known female novelist to look like, we cannot say. Nor could she have said; for any preconceived notion that may have been in her head was for ever wiped out by the sight of the novelist herself, her unfashionably long hair as usual on the verge of coming down, dressed in a deep red frock which bore unmistakable traces of having been badly packed.

"You haven't seen Anne since she was quite small, I think, Laura," said Lady Fielding to her distinguished guest.

"No, I don't think I have," said Mrs. Morland, shaking hands with Anne very kindly. "At least one never knows, because you do see people in church or at concerts or all sorts of places without much thinking about them, and if you aren't thinking about people you don't really see them, at least not in a recognizing kind of way. And I'm getting so blind," said Mrs. Morland, proudly, "that I shall soon recognize nobody at all."

Had any of Mrs. Morland's four sons been there, and more especially her youngest son Tony, now in the Low Countries with the artillery of the Barsetshire Yeomanry, any one of them would unhesitatingly and correctly have accused his mother of being a spectacle snob. For Mrs. Morland, who had never taken herself or her successful novels seriously, had, in her middle fifties, suddenly made the interesting discovery that she was really grown-up. This day comes to us all, at different times, in different ways. It may be the death of one of our parents which puts us at once into the front line; it may be the death or removal of a husband; it may be some responsibility thrust on us; in the case of Mrs. Turner at Northbridge orphan nieces; in the case of the present Earl and Countess of Pomfret the succession to wealth and estates. But Mrs. Morland's parents and also her husband had died before she was, as she herself expressed it, ripe for grown-upness, and with her four boys she had felt increasingly and very affectionately incompetent and silly, which indeed they, with equal affection, would have admitted, so she had found no real reason to be grown-up.

This fact she had lamented, though with her usual detachment, till two or three years before the date of this story, when she became for the first time in her life conscious of her eyes. Oliver Marling whose mother had supplied Miss Bunting, had strongly recommended his dear Mr. Pilbeam, lately released from the R.A.M.C. to look after the neglected civilian population. Mrs. Morland had visited Mr. Pilbeam, read as far as TUSLPZ quite easily, boggled over XEFQRM and failed hopelessly at FRGSBA. She had then been quite unable to make up her mind whether the left or right arm of a St. Andrew's cross looked darker or lighter, furthermore insisting that even an X cross couldn't have a left or right because each arm went right through, if Mr. Pilbeam could understand, and what he really meant was the north-west to south-east arm, or the north-east to south-west, and he oughtn't to say: "The right arm is darker than the left, isn't it?" because that was a leading question. A busy oculist might have been excused for losing his temper at this point, but Mr. Pilbeam not only had great patience, partly natural, partly acquired, but was a devoted reader of Mrs. Morland's books. So disentangling with great skill what she said from what she meant, he had finished the examination and written her a prescription for spectacles.

"I believe," said Mrs. Morland, after pinning up a good deal of her hair which the putting on and off of spectacles had considerably loosened, "that when it is a specialist one puts it in an envelope on the mantelpiece. But as I don't know how much, I can't. Besides, it might fall into the fire. But I did bring a cheque-book and if my fountain pen is working, or you would lend me yours, I could write it now. Unless, of course, you'd rather have pound notes because of avoiding the income tax, though I'm afraid I haven't quite enough if it is five guineas which Oliver said."

"Will you let me say, Mrs. Morland," said Mr. Pilbeam, "that I have had such pleasure from your books that I could not think of charging you for this consultation?"

Upon which Mrs. Morland, who never thought of herself as being a real author, let alone a pretty well-known one by now, was so much surprised that she sat goggling at her oculist while her face got pinker and pinker and a hairpin fell to the floor.

"But that doesn't seem fair," said Mrs. Morland at last.

Mr. Pilbeam, both gratified and embarrassed by the effect of his words, picked up her tortoiseshell pin and handed it to her.

"I shall be more than satisfied," said Mr. Pilbeam. "Especially," he added, "if you will give me one of your books with your autograph in it."

"Of course I will," said Mrs. Morland. "Only I'm afraid they are all exactly alike. You see I wrote my first book by mistake, I mean I didn't know how to write a book so I just wrote it, and then all the others seemed to come out the same. But if I gave you the last one, would it do? My publisher, who is really very nice and not a bit like what you would expect a publisher to be," said Mrs. Morland, "I mean he is an ordinary person, not like a publisher I once met who simply sat in a room and depressed one, says I could afford to write a few bad books by now, but I think this would be a bad thing because someone who hadn't read any of my books might think they were all bad, and not read any more. Not," Mrs. Morland continued, standing up and clutching various pieces of portable property to her in preparation for her departure, "that I would really mind, only I do earn my living by them."

At this point Mr. Pilbeam who, much as he enjoyed his new patient's spiral conversation, had his own living to earn, managed by a species of stage management perfected by him over a number of years, to waft her out of the room and into the arms of his secretary and so into the street. Her latest book was duly sent to him and since then she had revisited him once or twice, always on the same very friendly footing.

Now writing is a rum trade and eyes are rum things, and what is all right one day is all wrong the next. Mrs. Morland's sight was affected as most people's is by health, weather, heat, cold, lighting, added years, and by the sapping strain of some six years' totalitarian war. She was impatient with her eyes as most people are who have always had very good sight and nearly went mad with rage while accustoming herself to the bifocal glasses Mr. Pilbeam had ordered on her second visit. Finally she had collected four pairs of spectacles of varying power, from a rather dashing little semicircular lens for reading only, through the hated bifocals to which use had more or less reconciled her and an owl-like plain pair for cards (which she never played) and music (which she had almost entirely dropped), to a much stronger pair now really necessary for close work. To these she had added what she quite correctly called her face-à-main, feeling a pleasant inward disdain for her friends who said lorgnon or lorgnette. And what with mislaying all four pairs in every possible permutation and combination and catching the ribbon of her face-à-main in her clothes and the furniture, or bending it double by stooping suddenly, she hardly ever had the pair she needed. But the gods are just and of our pleasant vices do occasionally make something quite amusing, and we must say that Mrs. Morland got an infinite amount of innocent pleasure out of her armoury of glasses, and as she never expected people to listen to her she maundered on about them with considerable satisfaction to herself.

What Mrs. Morland would have liked to do was to raise her face-à-main to her eyes, examine Anne with the air of a grande dame (to which phrase she attached really no meaning at all) and then dropping it greet her warmly and say how exactly like one of her parents she was. But the red dress she was wearing had red buttons down its front, and the red ribbon (to match, for this also gave her much innocent pleasure) had got entangled in the buttons, so she had to give it up as a bad job, and being really a simple creature at heart she embraced Anne very affectionately.

"Tony always says that I fly at people and kiss them in a kind of higher carelessness," she said. "But I do assure you I never kiss people I don't like. If I did begin to kiss the Bishop's wife, even by mistake, something would stop me."

"I only met her once," said Anne, finding it, to her own great surprise, quite easy to talk to someone as celebrated as Mrs. Morland, "at a prize-giving at the Barchester High School and she said prizes really meant nothing, so all the girls who got prizes hated her. If I'd had a prize I'd have hated her too. But I hated her anyway because she had a horrid hat."

Mrs. Morland looked approvingly at a girl who had such sound instincts, and then Miss Bunting came in, preceding Admiral Palliser, Jane Gresham and the Dales, who had all walked up together, enjoying what afterwards turned out to be the one warm evening of a very nasty summer. The newcomers were all acquainted with Mrs. Morland, so there were no introductions to be made. Sherry was offered, talk was general. The sound of a gong was heard.

"Oh, mummy," said Anne, "that's to say dinner is ready because Gradka doesn't want anyone to see her yet, so will you come in, and Robin and I will do the clearing away."

Accordingly the party went across the stone hall into the dining-room. Here Gradka had draped vine leaves and tendrils most elegantly if a trifle embarrassingly on the shining mahogany round table, among the shining glasses and silver. Steaming soup was already on the table in Chinese bowls. Mrs. Morland was loud in her admiration of the exquisite way in which everything was kept, much to the pleasure of her host who had inherited beautiful things and added to his possessions with great taste.

A slight poke on her left shoulder made Mrs. Morland look up. Robin was standing beside her holding a bowl of tiny cubes of bread fried to a perfect, even, golden brown.

"Excuse my manners," he said, "I'm only here on liking."

"One moment," said Mrs. Morland putting up her glasses. "Oh, croûtons! Heavenly. But I must find my spectacles. I can't hold these things up and help myself at the same time."

She routed about in her bag, found a red spectacle case and put the spectacles on.

"It is so stupid not to see," she said in a voice of great satisfaction as she helped herself. "Thank you Robin. What is so boring," she continued, turning to Dr. Dale on her right, "is that though I can see my soup--what divine soup it is--with these glasses, I can't see faces across the table. Mrs. Gresham and Anne look almost the same. To see them I need this pair."

She grabbled about in her bag again and drew out a blue spectacle case, exchanged the glasses and announced with pride that she could see both ladies quite well and how nice they looked.

"But for my soup, I must return to the first pair," she said, taking the second pair off and putting it away.

"Do you know that you put the spectacles you have just taken off into the red case?" said Dr. Dale. "I don't want to interfere, but I think you took them out of the blue case."

"Oh, thank you, I am always doing that," said Mrs. Morland. "And sometimes I get so mixed that I don't know which pair is which until I suddenly can't see."

"Why not have different-coloured frames?" said Dr. Dale.

Mrs. Morland laid down her spoon, took off the spectacles she was wearing and looked with deep admiration at her neighbour.

"That," she said, "comes of having a good classical education. Now a person that only knew economics or things of that sort would never think of a really sensible thing like that."

Dr. Dale looked flattered: though more on behalf of the classics than himself, for he was a modest man as well as a good scholar.

"Next time I break the legs of one of them, which I'm always doing," said Mrs. Morland, "I'll have a new frame the same colour as the case and then I'll know."

"But suppose you break the glass and not the frame," said Dr. Dale.

"I expect I shall," said Mrs. Morland resignedly. "And that is a great nuisance, because it takes at least three or four months now to get new lenses and by the time you've got them you may be squinting in quite another direction. I did ask my oculist if he couldn't give me a prescription for the kind of glasses I'd probably be wanting six months later, but he thought not. I don't see why not myself, because my eyes just go on gently going bad, so surely he would know how bad they ought to be by October."

Dr. Dale said his sympathies were on both sides and then, the conversation now being well sustained all round the table, Mrs. Morland asked him about Robin, which she had not liked to do before in case he felt he was being discussed. Dr. Dale, who realized her sympathy, was able to give her a good account of Robin's progress and said the difficulty now was to decide whether he should go back to Southbridge where they wanted him for classics or keep on his pre-preparatory class for little boys and make it his profession. Mrs. Morland, who had known Robin since his own schooldays at Southbridge, where he was a couple of years senior to her youngest boy Tony, was very much interested in these plans and forgetting her spectacles managed to eat a large helping of an excellent chicken pilaf with a wreath of young vegetables of all kinds surrounding it.

Meanwhile Lady Fielding was having much the same conversation with Admiral Palliser, inquiring about Jane and whether she still hoped for news of her husband, to which the Admiral replied that the whole position was very trying and they had stopped discussing it.

"We are used to losing our men in naval families," he said. "Jane knew what the chances were when she married Francis, just as my sons' wives did--one is a brother Admiral's daughter you know, and the other the granddaughter of the captain of my father's first ship. But it's different now. Killed in action is bad: but you do know. This Japanese business is as black as midnight," said the Admiral, his face darkening. "She behaves excellently, but what kind of life is it? It may be months and years of uncertainty. She may never know. And she is young."

His face softened again and Lady Fielding guessed what he was thinking.

"Young and very charming," she said. "And all among older people. It is going to be very hard for these young wives, half widows."

"One may as well say, straight out," said the Admiral quietly, after glancing at his daughter who was deep in the kind of middle-aged flirtation that Sir Robert enjoyed, "that if any of them fall in love with a man on the spot, one won't feel able to blame them. My Jane is a good girl and it's going to be far more difficult for the good girls than the easy-going ones. But no good looking for trouble. Your Polish girl is a wonderful cook."

"She would probably run a knife into you for that," said Lady Fielding. "She's a Mixo-Lydian."

The Admiral began to laugh.

"I met the Admiral of the Mixo-Lydian fleet once," he said. "The fleet is an old Margate paddle-steamer that patrols the River Patsch where it forms the eastern boundary of Mixo-Lydia. She came round by the Mediterranean and up the Danube under her own power, I believe, about 1856 when Mixo-Lydia broke away from Slavo-Lydia. He was a smuggler and gave me some very good brandy."

A good deal of noise now stopped their talk. The noise was Robin and Anne taking away the pilaf with its accompaniments and bringing in the sour-milk pudding, Gradka's masterpiece. A piece of exquisitely flaky pastry, about the size and shape of a huge omelette lay on a large china dish. It was encrusted with some kind of delicious nutty-sugary confection, and when cut was found to contain a species of ambrosial cheese-cake. With it was served a bowl of hot sauce of which we can only say that if everyone will think of the supreme sweet sauce and add to it an unknown and ravishing flavour, it will but feebly explain its silken ecstasy. Conversation was stilled while sheer greed took its place.

"Well," said Robin reverently, "I never thought much of Hitler, but as he made the Mixo-Lydians be refugees, I suppose we must give the devil his due."

Anne industriously scraped the last flakes from the dish and handed him the spoon.

"God bless you for that kind act," said Robin. "One more mouthful of that pudding and I feel my foot would grow again."

His father looked at him, half in distress, half in pride.

"And two more mouthfuls and I'd be sick," he added thoughtfully.

"Oh, please, everybody," said Anne's light voice.

The table was silent, everyone looking at her.

"Oh, it's only," said Anne, blushing furiously and pleating her table napkin with agitated fingers, "that Gradka will come in now. Please, daddy, say something nice to her. She will bring the coffee in. Come on, Robin, and get the table ready."

While she and Robin tidied the table and put fruit from the garden and glasshouse upon it and took the pudding-dish away, Sir Robert went to the sideboard.

"Only Empire port, I fear," he said. "But we must drink Gradka's health. I wonder if it would be etiquette in Mixo-Lydia to offer her a glass."

As he spoke he was walking round the table, filling glasses.

"Put an extra glass beside me, Fielding," said the Admiral. "I think I know what Gradka likes."

Surprised, but willing, Sir Robert did as the Admiral asked and returned to his seat. Robin and Anne came back, shutting the door behind them and sat down.

"It's all right, daddy," said Anne. "She has to knock at the door, and you must say----"

But before she could finish, there was a loud single knock or rather bang on the door. Everyone felt nervous, for the capability for taking offence among Mixo-Lydian refugees is well known to have no bounds, and it was probable that whatever they did would be wrong.

"Oh, daddy!" said Anne in an agonized whisper, "say----"

But the Admiral, who had been looking on with some amusement, uttered a loud and barbarous monosyllable, the door was opened and Gradka came in. Seldom had she looked less attractive than at this moment, her large face and the plaits encircling her head damp with the heat of cooking, her lumpish figure enveloped in a checked apron.

The Admiral handed the spare glass to her, raised his own, and uttering some more barbarous words, drank the contents. Gradka replied in her native tongue, drank her wine and raised the empty glass shoulder high. The Admiral, with a peculiar expression which Mrs. Morland, sitting directly opposite him with her right spectacles on for once, thought unaccountably amused, spoke once more. Gradka shrugged her shoulders, put the glass on the table, said a few words to the Admiral and left the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.

"It's all right," said the Admiral to the gaping party. "The proper thing is to break the glass, and I thought you had rather not. She says I am her grandfather now: but it doesn't mean anything. My smuggler-friend was her uncle."

"I have always said," said Miss Bunting, who according to her own peculiar habit had sat almost silent through dinner, observing and making her own reflections, "that we should thank God for the British Navy."

Everyone except Miss Bunting felt slightly uncomfortable, and when a second loud knock was heard Lady Fielding almost jumped. But it was only a warning that the coffee was there, and Robin fetched the dinner-wagon from outside with the coffee equipage on it and the talk fell into more familiar channels again as Miss Bunting asked Dr. Dale about the next meeting of the Barsetshire Archaeological Society, of which he was a vice-president.

"I saw in the Barchester Chronicle," said she, "that it was to be held here. If there is any part of the proceedings to which the general public is admitted I should very much like to be there, and bring Anne."

Dr. Dale said there would be, if the weather permitted, a visit to the churchyard to inspect the ruins of the earlier Rectory and the disused well, over which a controversy had been raging: some saying that there were traces of Roman brickwork in the well, others again that there were not.

"That," said Miss Bunting, "would be very nice for Anne. Any educational excursion of that kind is good for her and she responds to it."

"May I say, Miss Bunting, how much your pupil has improved under your care," said Dr. Dale. "It is rare to find a girl who can enjoy her work so intelligently. And she looks so much better."

"That is partly Gradka's excellent food," said Miss Bunting. "As for Anne's education, I was lucky in finding almost virgin soil to work upon."

Dr. Dale said he thought Anne had been at Barchester High School.

"That," said Miss Bunting, "is precisely what I mean. School Certificate and Honour of the School. All very well for the daughters of Barchester tradesmen, but most unsuitable for Anne. When she came into my care she was in a pitiable state of nerves over this examination which any girl of average intelligence can pass. You only have to look at them to realize how little real education it means."

Dr. Dale was delighted by these reactionary sentiments and Sir Robert moved to a chair near them the better to take part in the discussion, Mrs. Morland and Jane Gresham who had been talking across him about the boys for some time hardly noticing his absence.

"Tell us, Miss Bunting," said Sir Robert, "what your idea of a really good education for a girl would be."

"In the first place," said Miss Bunting kindly but firmly, "it is much better, I might say almost essential, to have a large family."

Both gentlemen felt there was nothing for it but an apology. Each had an only child and it was far too late to do anything about it. And neither had felt so convicted of guilt since the crimes of boyhood.

"But I recognize," said Miss Bunting, straightening the little black velvet bow she wore at her neck, "that there are small families as well as large."

Both gentlemen breathed again.

In spite of an uneasy feeling that they were in Eton suits with inky collars and dirty finger-nails, the gentlemen much enjoyed their talk with Miss Bunting. Both believed in standards now almost submerged and both would uphold them to the end though their faith was often sorely tried. In Miss Bunting they recognized an unwavering faith and a habit of looking facts in the face unflinchingly and very often staring them down, which they found comforting and refreshing.

The party then drifted to the drawing-room, still lit by the sunset. Robin and Anne cleared the dining-room table and washed up the glass and silver in the pantry (Gradka being now locked into the kitchen grappling with the Ingoldsby Legends) and Robin told Anne a good deal about what a fool he felt when one thought one's foot was there and it really wasn't; to which Anne listened as usual with sympathetic interest, saying little, but in her mind drawing not unfavourable comparisons between Robin and such mutilated heroes as Benbow directing the sea battle with his shattered leg in a cradle, or Witherington with both legs shot away fighting upon his stumps, or even Long John Silver. But this last comparison she recognized to be a poor one and resolutely ignored it.

Jane Gresham would have liked to be in the pantry too; nor, we must say, would Robin or Anne have minded a third person in the least, and if it were Jane they would have welcomed her. But she had gradually slipped into a quite unnecessary feeling that she was not much wanted by what she rather conceitedly called young people. The foolish creature was only four years older than Robin, and even if thirteen years lay between her and Anne, those years were bridged by so many things: by Anne's rather invalid life which had in some ways marked her, by their common friends and interests in Hallbury, by Anne's very friendly nature when once the barrier of her timidity was down. But Jane, otherwise a sensible young woman, had invented for herself a theory that people who didn't know if their husbands were alive or dead and sometimes forgot about them for hours and even days at a stretch, who had to plan everyday life as if their husbands would for ever be wanderers in Stygian shades, their words unheard, their thoughts unshared; that such people were on the whole not wanted. In which she was undoubtedly silly, for she was both wanted and needed by a quantity of people, beginning with her father and her son and including quite a number of people in Hallbury and the neighbourhood of Barchester. But the heart does not always quite know its own folly, especially when it lets an overwrought mind interfere.

So Jane, looking elegant and unruffled, drifted to the drawing-room with the rest, and continued her conversation with Mrs. Morland about little boys, on whom that gifted authoress was something of an authority, having had four whom she liked very much and never pretended to understand. To do her justice she rarely spoke of them unasked and never made a nuisance of herself by motherly pride, but if encouraged in a friendly way was quite ready to talk.

The least egoistic of us like occasionally to dramatize ourselves. Mrs. Morland's trump card in this direction was the grandchildren she had never seen, as her two eldest boys had married shortly before the war, one in Canada, one in South Africa, and had never been able to bring their families home.

"You see," she said to Jane, "things are never so bad as you might hope, and I do really get the greatest pleasure out of my grandchildren, because it is lovely not to have them all living with me as I probably would have to if they were in England, and I can be as sentimental about them as I like without any fear of having to honour my bill, if that is what I mean. And when I think I have three grandchildren I feel so splendidly snobbish. And I sometimes hope that people will be surprised, for though I know I look quite fifty-four, which is what I am," said Mrs. Morland, pushing her hair off one side of her face with her face-à-main, "I don't think people expect a person who writes books to be a grandmother. Oh dear, I am all entangled."

Jane, skilfully extricating the face-à-main from the Rapunzel net in which it had become involved, asked why writers shouldn't be grandmothers.

"I can't imagine," said Mrs. Morland with an air of great candour, "for if they have grandchildren it stands to reason they must be grandmothers. But people will write to me as Miss Morland, a thing I never was, and probably if they know I have grandchildren they think they are illegitimate. But there is one very good thing," she added, earnestly, putting on the spectacles from the red case as she spoke, "which is that Henry, my husband you know, died such a long time ago, because I do not think he would have understood my grandchildren in the least. He did not really understand his own boys--not that I do either, but that is so different--and I used to think it would really have been far better if he had died before the boys were born instead of after, because it would have simplified everything."

Jane said that if Mr. Morland had died before his boys were born, he might not have had any.

Mrs. Morland took off her spectacles, closed them and put them into their case, the whole with one hand.

"I know one ought to take them off with alternate hands," she said, "just to keep the balance and prevent their warping, but whenever I think of it it is too late. Yes, I expect you are right about Henry. The fact is that though I have not and never have had anything against him at all, I never think of him. And I must say when he was alive I didn't think much about him either."

So rare was it for Mrs. Morland to allude to the husband whom old Mrs. Knox had described as excessivement nul, that Jane was taken aback. In common with most of Mrs. Morland's friends she had come to look upon the young Morlands as somehow the peculiar and unaided product of their mother. So much surprised that she took courage and said:

"Didn't you feel wicked when you didn't think about your husband, Mrs. Morland?"

"Never," said Mrs. Morland firmly. "And if you don't always think about Francis, my dear," she added, toying with the blue spectacle case as she spoke and looking earnestly at the middle distance, "it isn't wicked in the least. People cannot help being what they are like, and if it is a choice between being miserable and anxious all the time, or being fairly happy and having such a very nice happy little boy, and not depressing people, your attitude is very reasonable. And natural," said Mrs. Morland putting on her spectacles. "And right. Now which pair have I got on? If I look at something about as far off as playing a game of patience I shall know if they are the ones I can see with. I mean that I can see that distance with."

She looked wildly round and not seeing any card game at hand became depressed, but as quickly brightened. "For," she explained, "if I can see your face clearly where you are sitting, then they are the ones I can see people's faces in a railway carriage with. Yes, they are the ones," she continued. "But don't look so unhappy, Jane."

"One might be unhappy if one thought less and less about someone one did love very much," said Jane looking straight in front of her.

And then, luckily for Mrs. Morland who had no further help to offer from her own experiences and hated to see Jane so distressed, Robin and Anne came in from the pantry. Anne was carrying Mrs. Morland's last novel and as she approached her parents' famous guest, began to show such signs of confusion as kicking her own feet, going pink in the face and opening and shutting her mouth without producing any sound.

Mrs. Morland, who was used to this behaviour among her younger admirers, asked if that was a book she had.

Anne, not finding the question at all peculiar, said it was. Then summoning her courage she said pushing the book desperately towards its author:

"Oh, Mrs. Morland, would you please mind very much writing your name in this? I bought it with my own money because I adore your books, and think Madame Koska is the most wonderful person. I called a dog I had that died Koska."

Mrs. Morland who, in spite of a large circulation on both sides of the Atlantic was not in the least blasée about appreciation of her books, to which we may say, she attached no great literary value herself, said of course she would love to. A small table was handy, Robin produced a fountain pen and Mrs. Morland made a suitable inscription. Anne, pinker than ever with pleasure, was about to clutch the book to her bosom when Robin interrupted.

"Hi, Anne!" he exclaimed. "You'll blot it. Wait a minute."

He took the book to a writing-table, blotted it and returned.

"Good gracious!" said Mrs. Morland. "I wrote that without either of my spectacles! I must be going blind."

At this Robin, for all his endeavours, burst into a fit of laughter, followed by Anne, though she did not quite understand the joke. Jane smiled and went to talk to Lady Fielding.

"I suppose I am silly," said Mrs. Morland laughing herself. "But Robin, and Anne, I want to have a conspiracy with you," she added, leading her young friends out on to the stone path above which the highest tendrils of the vine caught the sun's dying glow. "Jane seems very unhappy because she can't worry about her husband as much as she ought to. What can be done?"

"It's a rotten position," said Robin. "She might hear he was dead, or he might walk in to-morrow. No, that's a bit too dramatic for this regimented war. But she might hear he was in a Swedish ship being repatriated and that he would be at a delousing camp in Stornaway till further notice and no questions to be asked. I beg your pardon, Miss Bunting," he added as that lady stepped out of the french window.

"If you mean for the use of the word delousing, I was familiar with it in the last war," said Miss Bunting.

She did not add "before you were born," but the effect was equally crushing.

"We were talking about Jane Gresham, Miss Bunting," said Mrs. Morland, feeling that in this elderly spinster with the little black velvet bow at her neck lay a far better and wiser knowledge of the world than she would ever have. "It seems so dreadfully unhappy to have this long uncertainty."

They were all silent for a moment, oppressed by the thought of a grief that no one could cure.

Anne was the first to speak.

"'Said heart of neither maid nor wife

To heart of neither wife nor maid,'"

she remarked with a kind of sad pride in having found the mot juste.

If Miss Bunting felt a shock at her literature-besotted pupil's highly inapt quotation, she was not the woman to show it.

"There is nothing that you can do," she said, looking round at a promising class. "You are doing all you can. The rest she will have to do for herself. I have seen it again and again in two wars. Come in now, Anne, it is getting chilly."

The one warm day of that summer was over. They all went back to the drawing-room, where Jane was describing with kind malice her visit to Mrs. Merivale at Valimere.

"Have you seen Mr. Adams about it yet, father?" she said to the Admiral.

The Admiral said he had spoken to Adams at the club, and he was coming out to see the lodgings.

"Oh, it was you who put Adams on to those rooms, Palliser," said Sir Robert. "He is like a clam--loves to make secrets about things. He was on the Silverbridge train with Dora and myself this afternoon, but he didn't say what he was up to. Mrs. Merivale's husband was in our office. Quite a good clerk, but would never have gone very far, even if he had lived. The sort of man who doesn't want responsibility."

"Adams? Adams? Now where have I heard that name?" said Dr. Dale.

No one offered an opinion.

"I have it!" said Dr. Dale. "He is a member of the Barsetshire Archæological Society, though why I cannot think, for he has no tincture of learning or any kind of letters. But he sent a handsome donation to our President Lord Pomfret's appeal for the excavations in that field on Lord Stoke's property where Vikings are supposed to be buried--Bloody Meadow. I believe Tebben, the Icelandic man over at Worsted, thought highly of some bones they found."

"Tebben," said Jane. "That's the man you said was offered a job at Adams's works, wasn't it, Laura?"

"Not the Icelandic one," said Mrs. Morland. "That's the father. It's the son, Richard, that Mrs. Tebben was talking about."

"Dr. Madeleine Sparling, the headmistress of the Hosiers' Girls' Foundation School," said Miss Bunting, while a reverent hush fell on the room, "with whom I have the pleasure of being slightly acquainted, told me, when we met at Lady Graham's one day, that she had under her charge a girl called Heather Adams, whose father was self-made and owned a large engineering works. This girl, she said, though with no particular background, had what amounted to a distinct talent for the higher form of mathematics, and was sitting for a scholarship at Newton College."

Miss Bunting's rolling periods, while received with the respect that was her due, rather flattened general conversation.

"I remember Miss Sparling," said Anne suddenly.

"Doctor now," said Miss Bunting. "She was given an honorary D.Litt. at Oxbridge last year. One should remember these things, both for politeness and for accuracy."

"Doctor, then," said Anne, taking the correction in good part, much to her parents' admiration. "She was living with Miss Pettinger at the High School for a bit, and the boarders said how ghastly the Pettinger was and how Miss, I mean Dr. Sparling's secretary had to make her cups of tea and find bits of food for her, because the Pettinger was so stingy. The secretary was called Miss Holly. She was rather like a plum-pudding--only very quick."

Anne was indeed coming out with a vengeance, thought her parents again. A few months ago she would have sat silent all evening, let alone talking in a quite interesting way.

"'Plum-pudding Flea,

Plum-pudding Flea,

Wherever you be,

O come to our Tree,

And listen, O listen, O listen to me,'"

said Robin.

"It sounds like a charm to call fools into a circle," said Sir Robert, more versed in the works of Shakespeare than those of Mr. Lear.

Then Jane said they must be going and the Dales said they would walk with them.

"By the way, Laura," said Jane Gresham. "If you are staying on to-morrow would you like to come and see us doing camouflage netting? It's quite amusing."

"And if you'd care to come and look at my little school afterwards," said Robin, "I'd be proud. I am also," he added, "speaking for my father, who is sure to want to show you his study. It is a ground-floor room with a lot of books in it and a good many photographs of school and college teams and societies--altogether remarkably like a study."

Mrs. Morland said if it suited the Fieldings she would love to. The Fieldings said then do stay to lunch and go by the good afternoon train. Mrs. Morland thanked them and her bag fell on the floor. Before the chivalry of Hallbury could rally she had stooped and picked it up herself. She then uttered a plaintive cry.

"Have you ricked yourself?" asked Jane, sympathetically.

"No, thank you," said Mrs. Morland. "It's only this. It's always happening."

She held up her unlucky face-à-main, the glass bent at an angle to the handle, so that it looked rather like the Quangle-Wangle when he sat with his head in his slipper.

"It is useless like this," said its owner, tragically. "And if I try to straighten it, it usually snaps or else the spring breaks."

She pushed the hairpins further into her head in a despairing way.

A perfect babel of advice arose. Some said have a longer ribbon, some a shorter. Others again said stick it down your front and chance it, while yet a further opinion was that it would be much safer to have one of those little ones that fold up and become a clip, only then it would cost about a hundred pounds with the purchase tax.

Robin stepped lightly to Mrs. Morland, took the corpse, straightened it carefully and returned it to her.

"Oh, thank you," said Mrs. Morland. "How you do it with your false foot I cannot think."