with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was
obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands
still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One
of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond
curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a
refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie
of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes,
and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. There
were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. There was also one
father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old
school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and
consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters
were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable
humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very
gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were mainly mothers
with daughters-daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts,
and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and
regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
all the time, though not formally absent.
Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and
the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and
croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of
rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted
and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl-Gertrude had found a
disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a
state of gentle revival-while their mother exercised a divided
chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate,
stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and
preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous
resumption of stirring.
We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was
a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret
had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her
breakdown, and understood these differences. She had the eagerness
of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and
personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic
about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing
himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story
illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-
minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on
the way to Grantchester.
I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh
fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper lip, and her brow
always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy
but determined. She had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an
even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a
lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed.
"I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year, and had tea under
the apple-blossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down."
(It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.)
"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about them-at the
Pitti and the Brera,-the Brera is wonderful-wonderful places,-but
it isn't like real study," she was saying presently… "We
bought bales of photographs," she said.
I thought the bales a little out of keeping.
But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully
dressed, talking of art and beautiful things and a beautiful land,
and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a
different kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-
coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed
translucent beside Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her
slender body was a grace to me.
I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest
and please her as well as I knew how.
We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of
Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit-he had given a talk to
Bennett Hall also-and our impression of him.
"He disappointed me, too," said Margaret.
I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter
of social progress, and she listened-oh! with a kind of urged
attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The
little curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and
general debris of his story, and made himself look very alert and
intelligent.
"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said. "I'm
glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you fellows altogether."
Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from
the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed and evidently in a
state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady