'Give me those grapes,' said Dolly.
'Hankering!' I said again.
And the rest of the way home, along the cool path where the dusk was
gathering among the bushes and the grass was damp now beneath our dusty
shoes, we walked with heads held high--hankering indeed!--two women
surely in perfect harmony with life and the calm evening, women of
wisdom and intelligence, of a proper pride and self-respect, kind women,
good women, pleasant, amiable women, contented women, pleased women; and
at the last corner, the last one between us and Mrs. Barnes's eye on the
terrace, Dolly stopped, put down the basket, and laying both her arms
about my shoulders kissed me.
'Cured,' she said, kissing me on one side of my face. 'Safe,' she said,
kissing me on the other.
And we laughed, both of us, confident and glad. And I went up to my room
confident and glad, for if I felt cured and Dolly was sure I was cured,
mustn't it be true?
Hankering indeed.
_September 21st._
But I'm not cured. For when I was alone in my room last night and the
house was quiet with sleep, a great emptiness came upon me, and those
fine defiant words of mine in the afternoon seemed poor things, poor
dwindled things, like kaisers in their night-gowns. For hours I lay
awake with only one longing: to creep back,--back into my shattered
beliefs, even if it were the littlest corner of them. Surely there must
be some corner of them still, with squeezing, habitable? I'm so small. I
need hardly any room. I'd curl up. I'd fit myself in. And I wouldn't
look at the ruin of the great splendid spaces I once thought I lived in,
but be content with a few inches. Oh, it's cold, cold, cold, left
outside of faith like this....
For hours I lay awake; and being ashamed of myself did no good, because
love doesn't mind about being ashamed.
_Evening._
All day I've slunk about in silence, watching for a moment alone with
Dolly. I want to tell her that it was only one side of me yesterday, and
that there's another, and another--oh, so many others; that I meant
every word I said, but there are other things, quite different, almost
opposite things that I also mean; that it's true I'm cured, but only
cured in places, and over the rest of me, the rest that is still sick,
great salt waves of memories wash every now and then and bite and
bite....
But Dolly, who seems more like an unruffled pool of clear water to-day
than ever, hasn't left Mrs. Barnes's side; making up, I suppose, for
being away from her all yesterday.
Towards tea-time I became aware that Mrs. Barnes was watching me with a
worried face, the well-known worried, anxious face, and I guessed she
was wondering if Dolly had been indiscreet on our picnic and told me
things that had shocked me into silence. So I cast about in my mind for
something to reassure her, and, as I thought fortunately, very soon
remembered the grapes.
'I'm afraid I ate too many grapes yesterday,' I said, when next I caught
her worried, questioning eye.
Her face cleared. I congratulated myself. But I didn't congratulate
myself long; for Mrs. Barnes, all motherly solicitude, inquired if by
any chance I had swallowed some of the stones; and desiring to reassure
her to the utmost as to the reason of my thoughtfulness, I said that
very likely I had; from the feel of things; from the kind of
heaviness.... And she, before I could stop her, had darted into the
kitchen--these lean women are terribly nimble--and before I could turn
round or decide what to do next, for by this time I was suspicious, she
was back again with Mrs. Antoine and all the dreadful paraphernalia of
castor oil. And I had to drink it. And it seemed hard that because I had
been so benevolently desirous to reassure Mrs. Barnes I should have to
drink castor oil and be grateful to her as well.
'This is petty,' I thought, sombrely eyeing the bottle,--I alluded in my
mind to Fate.
But as I had to drink the stuff I might as well do it gallantly. And so
I did; tossing it off with an air, after raising the glass and wishing
the onlookers health and happiness in what I tried to make a pleasant
speech.
Mrs. Barnes, Mrs. Antoine and Dolly stood watching me spellbound. A
shudder rippled over them as the last drops slid down.
Then I came up here.
_September 22nd._
Let me draw your attention, O ancient woman sitting at the end of my
life, to the colour of the trees and bushes in this place you once lived
in, in autumns that for you are now so far away. Do you remember how it
was like flames, and the very air was golden? The hazel-bushes, do you
remember them? Along the path that led down from the terrace to the
village? How each separate one was like a heap of light? Do you remember
how you spent to-day, the 22nd of September, 1919, lying on a rug in the
sun close up under one of them, content to stare at the clear yellow
leaves against the amazing sky? You ve forgotten, I daresay. You re only
thinking of your next meal and being put to bed. But you did spend a day
to-day worth remembering. You were very content. You were exactly
balanced in the present, without a single oscillation towards either the
past, a period you hadn't then learned to regard with the levity for
which you are now so remarkable, or to the future, which you at that
time, however much the attitude may amuse you now, thought of with doubt
and often with fear. Mrs. Barnes let you go to-day, having an
appreciation of the privileges due to the dosed, and you took a cushion
and a rug--active, weren't you--and there you lay the whole blessed day,
the sun warm on your body, enfolded in freshness, thinking of nothing
but calm things. Rather like a baby you were; a baby on its back sucking
its thumb and placidly contemplating the nursery ceiling. But the
ceiling was the great sky, with, two eagles ever so far up curving in
its depths, and when they sloped their wings the sun caught them and
they flashed.
It seems a pity to forget these things. They make up, after all, the
real preciousness of life. But I'm afraid my writing them down won't
make you _feel_ any joy in them again, you old thing. You'll be too
brittle and rheumaticky to be able to think of lying on the grass for a
whole day except with horror. I'm beginning to dislike the idea of being
forced into your old body; and, on reflection, your philosophical
detachment, your incapacity to do anything but laugh at the hopes and
griefs and exultations and disappointments and bitter pains of your
past, seems to me very like the fixed grimace of fleshless death.
_September 23rd._
Mrs. Barnes can't, however hard she tries, be with us absolutely
continuously. Gaps in her attendance do inevitably occur. There was one
of them to-day; and I seized it to say to Dolly across the momentarily
empty middle chair--we were on the terrace and the reading was going
on,--'I've not seen you alone since the grape day. I wanted to tell you
that I'm not cured. I had a relapse that very night. I meant all I said
to you, but I meant too, all I said to myself while I was having the
relapse. You'd better know the worst. I simply intolerably hankered.'
Dolly let Merivale fall on her lap, and gazed pensively at the distant
mountains across the end of the valley.
'It's only the last growlings,' she said after a moment.
'Growlings?' I echoed.
'It's only the last growlings and mutterings of a thunderstorm that's
going away. Whatever it was that happened to you--you've never told me,
you know, but I'm quite good at somehow knowing--was very like a
thunderstorm. A violent one. It was rather brief, it raged incredibly,
and then it rumbled off. Though you were flattened out while it was
going on, like some otherwise promising crop--'
'Oh,' I protested; but I had to laugh.
'--still when it took itself off you missed it. I wouldn't talk like
this,' she said, turning her sweet eyes to me, 'I wouldn't make fun if I
weren't sure you are on the road, anyhow, to being cured. Presently
you'll reach the stage when you begin to realise that falling out of
love is every bit as agreeable as falling in. It is, you know. It's a
wonderful feeling, that gradual restoration to freedom and one's
friends.'
'You don't understand after all,' I said.
Dolly said she did.
'No. Because you talk of falling out of love. What has happened to me is
far worse than that. That? That's nothing. It's what everybody is doing
all the time. What has happened to me is that I've lost my faith. It has
been like losing God, after years of trust in Him. I believed with all
my heart. And I am desolate.'
But Dolly only shook her head. 'You're not as desolate as you were,'
she said. 'Nobody who loves all this as you do--' and she turned up her
face to the warm sun, blinking her eyes,--'can go on being desolate
long. Besides--really, you know--look at that.'
And she pointed to the shining mountains across the valley's eastern
end.
Yes. That is eternal. Beauty is eternal. When I look at that, when I am
in the clear mood that, looking at the mountains, really _sees_ them,
all the rest, the bewilderment and crying out, the clinging and the
hankering, seem indeed unworthy. Imagine, with the vast landscape of the
splendid world spread out before you, not moving freely in it on and on
rejoicing and praising God, but sitting quite still lamenting in one
spot, stuck in sediment.
'Did you say sentiment?' asked Dolly.
'Did I say anything?' I asked in surprise, turning my head to her. 'I
thought I was thinking.'
'You were doing it aloud, then,' said Dolly. 'Was the word sentiment?'
'No. Sediment.'
'They're the same thing. I hate them both.'
_September 24th._
What will happen to Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when I go back to England? The
weather was a little fidgety to-day and yesterday, a little troubled,
like a creature that stirs fretfully in its sleep, and it set me
thinking. For once the change really begins at this time of the year it
doesn't stop any more. It goes on through an increasing unpleasantness
winds, rain, snow, blizzards--till, after Christmas, the real winter
begins, without a cloud, without a stir of the air, its short days
flooded with sunshine, its dawns and twilights miracles of colour.
All that fuss and noise of snow-flurries and howling winds is only the
preparation for the great final calm. The last blizzard, tearing away
over the mountains, is like an ugly curtain rolling up; and behold a new
world. One night while you are asleep the howls and rattlings suddenly
leave off, and in the morning you look out of the window and for the
first time for weeks you see the mountains at the end of the valley
clear against the eastern sky, clothed in all new snow from head to
foot, and behind them the lovely green where the sunrise is getting
ready. I know, because I was obliged to be here through the October and
November and December of the year the house was built and was being
furnished. They were three most horrid months; and the end of them was
heaven.
But what will become of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when the weather does
finally break up?
I can't face the picture of them spending a gloomy, half-warmed winter
down in some cheap pension; an endless winter of doing without things,
of watching every franc. They've been living like that for five years
now. Where does Dolly get her sweet serenity from? I wish I could take
them to England with me. But Dolly can't go to England. She is German.
She is doomed. And Mrs. Barnes is doomed too, inextricably tied up in
Dolly's fate. Of course I am going to beg them to stay on here, but it
seems a poor thing to offer them, to live up here in blizzards that I
run away from myself. It does seem a very doubtful offer of hospitality.
I ought, to make it real, to stay on with them. And I simply couldn't. I
do believe I would die if I had three months shut up with Mrs. Barnes in
blizzards. Let her have everything--the house, the Antoines, all, all
that I possess; but only let me go.
My spirit faints at the task before me, at the thought of the
persuasions and the protests that will have to be gone through. And
Dolly; how can I leave Dolly? I shall be haunted in London by visions of
these two up here, the wind raging round the house, the snow piled up to
the bedroom windows, sometimes cut off for a whole week from the
village, because only in a pause in the blizzard can the little black
figures that are peasants come sprawling over the snow with their
shovels to dig one out. I know because I have been through it that first
winter. But it was all new to us then, and we were a care-free, cheerful
group inside the house, five people who loved each other and talked
about anything they wanted to, besides being backed reassuringly by a
sack of lentils and several sacks of potatoes that Antoine, even then
prudent and my right hand, had laid in for just this eventuality. We
made great fires, and brewed strange drinks. We sat round till far into
the nights telling ghost stories. We laughed a good deal, and said just
what we felt like saying. But Mrs. Barnes and Dolly? Alone up here, and
undug out? It will haunt me.
_September 25th._
She hasn't noticed the weather yet. At least, she has drawn no
deductions from it. Evidently she thinks its fitfulness, its gleams of
sunshine and its uneasy cloudings over, are just a passing thing and
that it soon will settle down again to what it was before. After all,
she no doubt says to herself, it is still September. But Antoine knows
better, and so do I, and it is merely hours now before the break-up will
be plain even to Mrs. Barnes. Then the _combats de générosité_ will
begin. I can't, I can't stop here so that Mrs. Barnes may be justified
to herself in stopping too on the ground of cheering my solitude. I
drank the castor oil solely that her mind might be at rest, but I can't
develope any further along lines of such awful magnanimity. I would die.
_September 26th._
To-day I smoked twelve cigarettes, only that the house should smell
virile. They're not as good as a pipe for that, but they're better than
the eternal characterless clean smell of unselfish women.
After each cigarette Mrs. Barnes got up unobtrusively and aired the
room. Then I lit another.
Also I threw the cushions on the floor before flinging myself on the
sofa in the hall; and presently Mrs. Barnes came and tidied them.
Then I threw them down again.
Towards evening she asked me if I was feeling quite well. I wasn't,
because of the cigarettes, but I didn't tell her that. I said I felt
very well indeed. Naturally I couldn't explain to her that I had only
been trying to pretend there was a man about.
'You're sure those grape-stones--?' she began anxiously.
'Oh, certain!' I cried; and hastily became meek.
_September 27th._
Oaths, now. I shrink from so much as suggesting it, but there _is_
something to be said for them. They're so brief. They get the mood over.
They clear the air. Women explain and protest and tiptoe tactfully about
among what they think are your feelings, and there's no end to it. And
then, if they're good women, good, affectionate, unselfish women, they
have a way of forgiving you. They keep on forgiving you. Freely. With a
horrible magnanimousness. Mrs. Barnes insisted on forgiving me
yesterday for the cigarettes, for the untidiness. It isn't a happy
thing, I think, to be shut up in a small lonely house being forgiven.
_September 28th._
In the night the wind shook the windows and the rain pelted against
them, and I knew that when I went down to breakfast the struggle with
Mrs. Barnes would begin.
It did. It began directly after breakfast in the hall, where Antoine,
remarking firmly '_C'est l'hiver_,' had lit a roaring fire, determined
this time to stand no parsimonious nonsense, and it has gone on all day,
with the necessary intervals for recuperation.
Nothing has been settled. I still don't in the least know what to do.
Mrs. Barnes's attitude is obstinately unselfish. She and Dolly, she
reiterates, won't dream of staying on here unless they feel that by
doing so they could be of service to me by keeping me company. If I'm
not here I can't be kept company with; that, she says, I must admit.
I do. Every time she says it--it has been a day of reiterations--I admit
it. Therefore, if I go they go, she finishes with a kind of sombre
triumph at her determination not to give trouble or be an expense; but
words fail her, she adds, (this is a delusion,) to express her gratitude
for my offer, etc., and never, for the rest of their lives, will she and
Dolly forget the delightful etc., etc.
What am I to do? I don't know. How lightly one embarks on marriage and
on guests, and in what unexpected directions do both develope! Also,
what a terrible thing is unselfishness. Once it has become a habit, how
tough, how difficult to uproot. A single obstinately unselfish person
can wreck the happiness of a whole household. Is it possible that I
shall have to stay here? And I have so many things waiting for me in
England that have to be done.
There's a fire in my bedroom, and I've been sitting on the floor staring
into it for the past hour, seeking a solution. Because all the while
Mrs. Barnes is firmly refusing to listen for a moment to my entreaties
to use the house while I'm away, her thin face is hungry with longing to
accept, and the mere talking, however bravely, of taking up the old
homeless wandering again fills her tired eyes with tears.
Once I got so desperate that I begged her to stay as a kindness to me,
in order to keep an eye on those patently efficient and trustworthy
Antoines. This indeed was the straw-clutching of the drowning, and even
Mrs. Barnes, that rare smiler, smiled.
No. I don't know what to do. How the wind screams. I'll go to bed.
_September 29th._
And there's nothing to be done with Dolly either.
'You told me you put your foot down sometimes,' I said, appealing to her
this morning in one of Mrs. Barnes's brief absences, 'Why don't you put
it down now?'
'Because I don't want to,' said Dolly.
'But _why_ not?' I asked, exasperated. 'It's so reasonable what I
suggest, so easy--'
'I don't want to stay here without you,' said Dolly. 'This place _is_
you. You've made it. It is soaked in you. I should feel haunted here
without you. Why, I should feel lost.'
'As though you would! When we hardly speak to each other as it is--'
'But I watch you,' said Dolly, smiling, 'and I know what you're
thinking. You've no idea how what you're thinking comes out on your
face.'
'But if it makes your unhappy sister's mind more comfortable? If she
feels free from anxiety here? If she feels you are safe here?' I
passionately reasoned.
'I don't want to be safe.'
'Oh Dolly--you're not going to break out again?' I asked, as anxiously
every bit as poor Mrs. Barnes would have asked.
Dolly laughed. 'I'll never do anything again that makes Kitty unhappy,'
she said. 'But I do like the feeling--' she made a movement with her
arms as though they were wings--'oh, I _like_ the feeling of having
room!'
_September 30th._
The weather is better again, and there has been a pause in our
strivings. Mrs. Barnes and I have drifted, tired both of us, I resting
in that refuge of the weak, the putting off of making up my mind, back
into talking only of the situation and the view. If Mrs. Barnes were
either less good or more intelligent! But the combination of
non-intelligence with goodness is unassailable. You can't get through.
Nothing gets through. You give in. You are flattened out. You become a
slave. And your case is indeed hopeless if the non-intelligent and
good, are at the same time the victims, nobly enduring, of undeserved
misfortune.
_Evening._
A really remarkable thing happened to-day: I've had a prayer answered. I
shall never dare pray again. I prayed for a man, any man, to come and
leaven us, and I've got him.
Let me set it down in order.
This afternoon on our walk, soon after we had left the house and were
struggling along against gusts of wind and whirling leaves in the
direction, as it happened, of the carriage road up from the valley,
Dolly said, 'Who is that funny little man coming towards us?'
And I looked, and said after a moment in which my heart stood still--for
what had _he_ come for?--'That funny little man is my uncle.'
There he was, the authentic uncle: gaiters, apron, shovel hat. He was
holding on his hat, and the rude wind, thwarted in its desire to frolic
with it, frisked instead about his apron, twitching it up, bellying it
out; so that his remaining hand had all it could do to smooth the apron
down again decorously, and he was obliged to carry his umbrella pressed
tightly against his side under his arm.
'Not your uncle the Dean?' asked Mrs. Barnes in a voice of awe, hastily
arranging her toque; for a whiff of the Church, any whiff, even one so
faint as a curate, is as the breath of life to her.
'Yes,' I said, amazed and helpless. 'My Uncle Rudolph.'
'Why, he might be a German,' said Dolly, 'with a name like that.'
'Oh, but don't say so to him!' I cried. 'He has a perfect _horror_ of
Germans--'
And it was out before I remembered, before I could stop it. Good
heavens, I thought; good heavens.
I looked sideways at Mrs. Barnes. She was, I am afraid, very red. So I
plunged in again, eager to reassure her. 'That is to say,' I said, 'he
used to have during the war. But of course now that the war is over it
would be mere silliness--nobody minds now--nobody _ought_ to mind now--'
My voice, however, trailed out into silence, for I knew, and Mrs. Barnes
knew, that people do mind.
By this time we were within hail of my uncle, and with that joy one
instinctively assumes on such occasions I waved my stick in exultant
circles at him and called out, 'How very delightful of you, Uncle
Rudolph!' And I advanced to greet him, the others tactfully dropping
behind, alone.
There on the mountain side, with the rude wind whisking his clothes
irreverently about, we kissed; and in my uncle's kiss I instantly
perceived something of the quality of Mrs. Barnes's speeches the day I
smoked the twelve cigarettes,--he was forgiving me.
'I have come to escort you home to England,' he said, his face spread
over with the spirit of allowing byegones to be byegones; and in that
spirit he let go of his apron in order reassuringly to pat my shoulder.
Immediately the apron bellied. His hand had abruptly to leave my
shoulder so as to clutch it down again. 'You are with ladies?' he said a
little distractedly, holding on to this turbulent portion of his
clothing.
'Yes, Uncle Rudolph,' I replied modestly. 'I hope you didn't expect to
find me with gentlemen?'
'I expected to find you, dear child, as I have always found you,--ready
to admit and retrace. Generously ready to admit and retrace.'
'Sweet of you,' I murmured. 'But you should have let me know you were
coming. I'd have had things killed for you. Fatted things.'
'It is not I,' he said, in as gentle a voice as he could manage, the
wind being what it was, 'who am the returning prodigal. Indeed I wish
for your sake that I were. My shoulders could bear the burden better
than those little ones of yours.'
This talk was ominous, so I said, 'I must introduce you to Mrs. Barnes
and her sister Mrs. Jewks. Let me present,' I said ceremoniously,
turning to them who were now fortunately near enough, 'my Uncle Rudolph
to you, of whom you have often heard me speak.'
'Indeed we have,' said Mrs. Barnes, with as extreme a cordiality as awe
permitted.
My uncle, obviously relieved to find his niece not eccentrically alone
but flanked by figures so respectable, securely, as it were, embedded in
widows, was very gracious. Mrs. Barnes received his pleasant speeches
with delighted reverence; and as we went back to the house, for the
first thing to do with arrivals from England is to give them a bath, he
and she fell naturally into each other's company along the narrow track,
and Dolly and I followed behind.
We looked at each other, simultaneously perceiving the advantages of
four rather than of three. Behind Mrs. Barnes's absorbed and obsequious
back we looked at each other with visions in our eyes of unsupervised
talks opening before us.
'They have their uses, you see,' I said in a low voice,--not that I need
have lowered it in that wind.
'Deans have,' agreed Dolly, nodding.
And my desire to laugh,--discreetly, under my breath, ready to pull my
face sober and be gazing at the clouds the minute our relations should
turn round, was strangled by the chill conviction that my uncle's coming
means painful things for me.
He is going to talk to me; talk about what I am trying so hard not to
think of, what I really am succeeding in not thinking of; and he is
going to approach the desolating subject in, as he will say and perhaps
even persuade himself to believe, a Christian spirit, but in what really
is a spirit of sheer worldliness. He has well-founded hopes of soon
going to be a bishop. I am his niece. The womenkind of bishops should be
inconspicuous, should see to it that comment cannot touch them.
Therefore he is going to try to get me to deliver myself up to a life
of impossible wretchedness again, only that the outside of it may look
in order. The outside of the house,--of the house of a bishop's
niece,--at all costs keep it neat, keep it looking like all the others
in the street; so shall nobody know what is going on inside, and the
neighbours won't talk about one's uncle.
If I were no relation but just a mere ordinary stranger-soul in
difficulties, he, this very same man, would be full of understanding,
would find himself unable, indeed, the facts being what they are, to be
anything but most earnestly concerned to help me keep clear of all
temptations to do what he calls retrace. And at the same time he would
be concerned also to strengthen me in that mood which is I am sure the
right one, and does very often recur, of being entirely without
resentment and so glad to have the remembrance at least of the beautiful
things I believed in. But I am his niece. He is about to become a
bishop. Naturally he has to be careful not to be too much like Christ.
Accordingly I followed uneasily in his footsteps towards the house,
dreading what was going to happen next. And nothing has happened next.
Not yet, anyhow. I expect to-morrow....
We spent a most bland evening. I'm as sleepy and as much satiated by
ecclesiastical good things as though I had been the whole day in church.
My uncle, washed, shaven, and restored by tea, laid himself out to
entertain. He was the decorous life of the party. He let himself go to
that tempered exuberance with which good men of his calling like to
prove that they really are not so very much different from other people
after all. Round the hall fire we sat after tea, and again after supper,
Dolly and I facing each other at the corners, my uncle and Mrs. Barnes
in the middle, and the room gently echoed with seemly and strictly
wholesome mirth. 'How enjoyable,' my uncle seemed to say, looking at us
at the end of each of his good stories, gathering in the harvest of our
appreciation, 'how enjoyable is the indulgence of legitimate fun. Why
need one ever indulge in illegitimacy?'
And indeed his stories were so very good that every one of them, before
they reached the point of bringing forth their joke, must have been to
church and got married.
Dolly sat knitting, the light shining on her infantile fair hair, her
eyes downcast in a dove-like meekness. Punctually her dimple flickered
out at the right moment in each anecdote. She appeared to know by
instinct where to smile; and several times I was only aware that the
moment had come by happening to notice her dimple.
As for Mrs. Barnes, for the first time since I have known her, her face
was cloudless. My uncle, embarked on anecdote, did not mention the war.
We did not once get on to Germans. Mrs. Barnes could give herself up to
real enjoyment. She beamed. She was suffused with reverential delight.
And her whole body, the very way she sat in her chair, showed an
absorption, an eagerness not to miss a crumb of my uncle's talk, that
would have been very gratifying to him if he were not used to just this.
It is strange how widows cling to clergymen. Ever since I can remember,
like the afflicted Margaret's apprehensions in Wordsworth's poem, they
have come to Uncle Rudolph in crowds. My aunt used to raise her eyebrows
and ask me if I could at all tell her what they saw in him.
When we bade each other goodnight there was something in Mrs. Barnes's
manner to me that showed me the presence of a man was already doing its
work. She was aerated. Fresh, air had got into her and was circulating
freely. At my bedroom door she embraced me with warm and simple
heartiness, without the usual painful search of my face to see if by any
chance there was anything she had left undone in her duty of being
unselfish. My uncle's arrival has got her thoughts off me for a bit. I
knew that what we wanted was a man. Not that a dean is quite my idea of
a man, but then on the other hand neither is he quite my idea of a
woman, and his arrival does put an end for the moment to Mrs. Barnes's
and my dreadful _combats de générosité_. He infuses fresh blood into our
anaemic little circle. Different blood, perhaps I should rather say; the
blood of deans not being, I think, ever very fresh.
'Good night, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, getting up at ten o'clock and
holding up my face to him. 'We have to thank you for a delightful
evening.'
'Most delightful,' echoed Mrs. Barnes enthusiastically, getting up too
and rolling up her knitting.
My uncle was gratified. He felt he had been at his best, and that his
best had been appreciated.
'Good night, dear child,' he said, kissing my offered cheek. 'May the
blessed angels watch about your bed.'
'Thank you, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, bowing my head beneath this
benediction.
Mrs. Barnes looked on at the little domestic scene with reverential
sympathy. Then her turn came.
'_Good_ night, Mrs. Barnes,' said my uncle most graciously, shaking
hands and doing what my dancing mistress used to call bending from the
waist.