taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled

vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the

apparition of motor-car's.

My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters

at all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which

they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to

them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy,

had cut their children off from the general social sea in which

their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening

any other world in exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with

the works and his business affairs and his private vices to

philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls,

preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and

make home bright and be given things. He was irritated that they

would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed

to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men. The

tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the

bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas

whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had

indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as

they came.

I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in

life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for

their development. They supplemented the silences of home by the

conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular

fiction. They had to make what they could out of life with such

hints as these. The church was far too modest to offer them any

advice. It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they

were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive

passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of

certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R.

N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same

thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next

visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I

came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a

negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer

flaunted quite so openly in my face.

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe

that the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the

phrase. That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of

endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of

American girl. When some years ago I paid my first and only visit

to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I

entered the train at Euston. There were three girls in my

compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being

seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the

"steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very

soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a good time, as

my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young

women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that

you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of

its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself

and presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying

about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common

currency. My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle

caressed them with parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he

exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the

new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how

to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel

encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them. But

then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything;

I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was

romantic and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married

state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them,

composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old. I

don't know what they thought about children. I doubt if they

thought about them at all. It was very secret if they did.

As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were

always ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware

of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that

circumambient poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as

disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper. They

knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were

"Agitators." It surprised them a little, I think, that Agitators

were not more drastically put down. But they had a sort of

instinctive dread of social discussion as of something that might

breach the happiness of their ignorance…