Joan and Peter: The story of an education

Growing out of his Red Indian phase Peter moved up into the Lower Sixth and became a regular cynical man of the world with an air of knowing more than a thing or two. He was, in fact, learning a vast number of things that are outside the books; and rearranging many of his early shocks and impressions by the help of a confusing and increasing mixture of half-lights. The chaotic disrespect of the young went out of his manner in his allusion to school affairs, he no longer spoke of various masters as “Buzzy,” “Snooks,” and “the Croker,” and a curious respectability had invaded his demeanour. The Head had had him in to tea and tennis. The handle of the prefect’s birch was perhaps not more than a year now from his grip, if he bore himself gravely. He reproached Joan on various small occasions for “thundering bad form,” and when Wilmington came, a much more wary and better-looking Wilmington with his heart no longer on his sleeve, the conversation became, so to speak, political. They talked at the dinner-table of the behaviour of so-and-so and this-and-that at “High” and at “Bottoms” and on “the Corso”; they discussed various cases of “side” and “cheek,” and the permanent effect of these upon the standing and reputations of the youths concerned; they were earnest to search out and know utterly why Best did not get his colours and whether it was just to “super” old Rawdon. They discussed the question of superannuation with Oswald very gravely. “Don’t you think,” said Oswald, “if a school takes a boy on, it ought to see him through?”

“But if he doesn’t work, sir?” said Wilmington.

“A school oughtn’t to produce that lassitude,” said Oswald.

“A chap ought to use a school,” said Peter.

That was a new point of view to Oswald and Joan.

Afterwards came Troop, a larger boy than either Peter or Wilmington, a prefect, a youth almost incredibly manly in his manner, and joined on to these discussions. Said Oswald, “There ought not to be such a thing as superannuation. A man ought not to be let drift to the point of unteachable incapacity. And then thrown away. Some master ought to have shepherded him in for special treatment.”

“They don’t look after us to that extent, sir,” said Troop.

“Don’t they teach you? Or fail to teach you?”

“It’s the school teaches us,” said Peter, as though it had just occurred to him.

“Still, the masters are there,” said Oswald, smiling.

“The masters are there,” Troop acquiesced. “But the life of the school is the tradition. And a big chap like Rawdon hanging about, too big to lick and too stupid for responsibility—— It breaks things up, sir.”

Oswald was very much interested in this prefect’s view of the school life. Behind his blank mask he engendered questions; his one eye watched Troop and went from Troop to Peter. This manliness in the taught surprised him tremendously. Peter was acquiring it rapidly, but Troop seemed to embody it. Oswald himself had been a man early enough and had led a hard life of mutual criticism and exasperation with his fellows, but that had been in a working reality, the navy; this, he reflected, was a case of cocks crowing inside the egg. These boys were living in a premature autonomous state, an aristocratic republic with the Head as a sort of constitutional monarch. There was one questionable consequence at least. They were acquiring political habits before they had acquired wide horizons. Were the political habits of a school where all the boys were of one race and creed and class, suitable for the problems of a world’s affairs?

Troop, under Oswald’s insidious leading, displayed his ideas modestly but frankly, and they were the ideas of a large child. Troop was a good-looking, thoroughly healthy youth, full of his grave responsibilities towards the school and inclined to claim a liberal attitude. He was very great upon his duty to “make the fellows live decently and behave decently.” He was lured into a story of how one youth with a tendency to long hair had been partly won and partly driven to a more seemly coiffure; how he had dealt with a games shirker, and how a fellow had been detected lending socialist pamphlets—“not to his friends, sir, I shouldn’t mind that so much, but pushing them upon any one”—and restrained. “Seditious sort of stuff, sir, I believe. No, I did not read it, sir.” Troop was for cold baths under all circumstances, for no smoking under sixteen and five foot six, and for a simple and unquestioning loyalty to any one who came along and professed to be in authority over him. When he mentioned the king his voice dropped worshipfully. Upon the just use of the birch Troop was conscientiously prolix. There were prefects, he said, who “savaged” the fellows. Others swished without judgment. Troop put conscience into each whack.

Troop’s liberalism interested Oswald more than anything else about him. He was proud to profess himself no mere traditionalist; he wanted Caxton to “broaden down from precedent to precedent.” Indeed he had ambitions to be remembered as a reformer. He hoped, he said, to leave the school “better than he found it”—the modern note surely. His idea of a great and memorable improvement was to let the Upper Fifth fellows into the Corso after morning service on Sunday. He did not think it would make them impertinent; rather it would increase their self-respect. He was also inclined to a reorganization of the afternoon fagging “to stop so much bawling down the corridor.” There ought to be a bell—an electric bell—in each prefect’s study. No doubt that was a bit revolutionary—Troop almost smirked. “It’s all very well for schools like Eton or Winchester to stick to the old customs, sir, but we are supposed to be an Up-to-Date school. Don’t you think, sir?” The egg was everything to this young cockerel; the world outside was naught. Oswald led him on from one solemn puerility to another, and as the big boy talked in his stout man-of-the-world voice, the red eye roved from him to Peter and from Peter back to Troop. Until presently it realized that Peter was watching it as narrowly. “What does Peter really think of this stuff?” thought Oswald. “What does Nobby really think of this stuff?” queried Peter.

“I suppose, some day, you’ll leave Caxton,” said Oswald.

“I shall be very sorry to, sir,” said Troop sincerely.

“Have you thought at all——”

“Not yet, sir. At least——”

“Troop’s people,” Peter intervened, “are Army people.”

“I see,” said Oswald.

Joan listened enviously to all this prefectorial conversation. At Highmorton that sort of bossing and influencing was done by the junior staff....

Oswald did his best to lure Troop from his administrative preoccupations into general topics. But apparently some one whom Troop respected had warned him against general topics. Oswald lugged and pushed the talk towards religion, Aunt Phyllis helping, but they came up against a stone wall. “My people are Church of England,” said Troop, intimating thereby that his opinions were banked with the proper authorities. It was not for him to state them. And in regard to politics, “All my people are Conservative.” One evening Oswald showed him a portfolio of drawings from various Indian temples, and suggested something of the complex symbolism of the figures. Troop thought it was “rather unhealthy.” But—turning from these monstrosities—he had hopes for India. “My cousin tells me, sir, that cricket and polo are spreading very rapidly there.” “Polo,” said Oswald, “is an Indian game. They have played it for centuries. It came from Persia originally.” But Troop was unable to imagine Indians riding horses; he had the common British delusion that the horse and the ship were both invented in our islands and that all foreign peoples are necessarily amateurs at such things. “I thought they rode elephants,” said Troop with quiet conviction....

Troop was not only a great experience for Oswald, he also exercised the always active mind of Joan very considerably.

Peter, it seemed, hadn’t even mentioned her beforehand.

“Hullo!” said Troop at the sight of her. “Got a sister?”

“Foster-sister,” said Peter, minimizing the thing. “Joan, this is Troop.”

Joan regarded him critically. “Can he play D.P.?”

“Not one of my games,” said Troop, who was chary of all games not usually played.

“It’s a game like Snap,” said Peter with an air of casual contempt, and earned a bright scowl.

For a day or so Troop and Joan kept aloof, watching one another. Then she caught him out rather neatly twice at single wicket cricket; he had a weakness for giving catches to point and she had observed it. “Caught!” he cried approvingly. Also she snicked and slipped and at last slogged boldly at his patronizing under-arm bowling. “Here’s a Twister,” he said, like an uncle speaking to a child.

Joan smacked it into the cedar. “Twister!” quoth Joan, running.

After that he took formal notice of her, betraying a disposition to address her as “Kid.” (Ralph Connor was at that time adding his quota to the great British tradition. It is true he wrote in American about cowboys—but a refined cowboy was the fullest realization of an English gentleman’s pre-war ideals—and Ralph Connor’s cowboys are essentially refined. Thence came the “Kid,” anyhow.) But Joan took umbrage at the “Kid.” And she disliked Troop’s manner and influence with Peter. And the way Peter stood it. She did not understand what a very, very great being a prefect is in an English public school, she did not know of Troop’s superbness at rugger, it seemed to her that it was bad manners to behave as though a visit to Pelham Ford were an act of princely condescension. She was even disposed to diagnose Troop’s largeness, very unjustly, as fat. So she pulled up Troop venomously with “My name’s not Kit, it’s Joan. J.O.A.N.”

“Sorry!” said Troop. And being of that insensitive class whose passions are only to be roused by a smacking, he began to take still more notice of her. She was, he perceived, a lively Kid. He felt a strong desire to reprove and influence her. He had no suspicion that what he really wanted to do was to interest Joan in himself.

Joan’s tennis was incurably tricky. Troop’s idea of tennis was to play very hard and very swiftly close over the net, but without cunning. Peter and Wilmington followed his lead. But Joan forced victory upon an unwilling partner by doing unexpected things.

Troop declared he did not mind being defeated, but that he was shocked by the spirit of Joan’s play. It wasn’t “sporting.”

“Those short returns aren’t done, Kid,” he said.

“I do them,” said Joan. “Ancient.”

Peter and Wilmington were visibly shocked, but Troop showed no resentment at the gross familiarity.

“But if every one did them!” he reasoned.

“I could take them,” said Joan. “Any one could take them who knew how.”

The dispute seemed likely to die down into unverifiable assertions.

“Peter can take them,” said Joan. “He drops them back. But he isn’t doing it today.”

Peter reflected. Troop would never understand, but there was something reasonable in Joan’s line. “I’ll see to Joan,” he said abruptly, and came towards the middle of the net.

The game continued on unorthodox but brilliant lines. “I don’t call this tennis,” said Troop.

“If you served to her left,” said Peter.

“But she’s a girl!” protested Troop. “Serve!”

He made the concessions that are proper to a lady, and Joan scored the point after a brief rally with Peter. “Game,” said Joan.

Troop declared he did not care to play again. It would put him off tennis. “Take me as a partner,” said Joan. “No—I don’t think so, thanks,” said Troop coldly.

Every one became thoughtful and drifted towards the net. Oswald approached from the pergola, considering the problem.

“I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing for years,” he remarked, strolling towards them.

“Well, sir, aren’t you with me?” asked Troop.

“No. I’m for Joan—and Peter.”

“But that sort of trick play——”

“No. The way to play a game is to get all over the game and to be equal to anything in it. If there is a stroke or anything that spoils the game it ought to be barred by the rules. Apart from that, a game ought to be worked out to its last possibility. Things oughtn’t to be barred in the interests of a few conventional swipes. This cutting down of a game to just a few types of stroke——”

Peter looked apprehensive.

“It’s laziness,” said Oswald.

Troop was too puzzled to be offended. “But you have to work tremendously hard, sir, at the proper game.”

“Not mentally,” said Oswald. “There’s too much good form in all our games. It’s just a way of cutting down a game to a formality.”

“But, for instance, sir, would you bowl grounders at cricket?”

“If I thought the batsman had been too lazy to learn what to do with them. Why not?”

“If you look at it like that, sir!” said Troop and had no more to say. But he went away marvelling. Oswald was a V.C. Yet he looked at games like—like an American, he played to win; it was enough to perplex any one....

“Must confess I don’t see it,” said Troop when Oswald had gone....

When at last Troop and Wilmington departed Oswald went with them to the station—the luggage was sent on in the cart—and walked back over the ploughed ridge and up the lane with Peter. For a time they kept silence, but Troop was in both their minds.

“He’s a good sort,” said Peter.

“Admirable—in some ways.”

“I thought,” said Peter, “you didn’t like him. You kept on pulling his leg.”

So Peter had seen.

“Well, he doesn’t exercise his brain very much,” said Oswald.

“Stops short at his neck,” said Peter. “Exercise, I mean.”

“You and Troop are singularly unlike each other,” said Oswald.

“Oh, that’s exactly it. I can’t make out why I like him. If nothing else attracted me, that would.”

“Does he know why he likes you?”

“Hasn’t the ghost of an idea. It worries him at times. Makes him want to try and get all over me.”

“Does he—at all?”

“Lots,” said Peter. “I fag at the blessed Cadet Corps simply because I like him. At rugger he’s rather a god, you know. And he’s a clean chap.”

“He’s clean.”

“Oh, he’s clean. It’s catching,” said Peter, and seemed to reflect. “And in a sort of way lately old Troop’s taken to swatting. It’s pathetic.” Then with a shade of anxiety, “I don’t think for a moment he twigged you were pulling his leg.”

Oswald came to the thing that was really troubling him. “Allowing for his class,” said Oswald, “that young man is growing up to an outlook upon the world about as broad and high as the outlook of a bricklayer’s labourer.”

Peter reflected impartially, and Oswald noted incidentally what a good profile the boy was developing.

“A Clean, Serious bricklayer’s labourer,” said Peter, weighing his adjectives carefully.

“But he may go into Parliament, or have to handle a big business,” said Oswald.

“Army for Troop,” said Peter, “via a university commission.”

“Even armies have to be handled intelligently nowadays,” said Oswald.

“He’ll go into the cavalry,” said Peter, making one of those tremendous jumps in thought that were characteristic of himself and Joan.

§ 12

A day or so after Troop’s departure Peter waylaid Oswald in the garden. Peter, now that Troop had gone, was amusing himself with dissection again—an interest that Troop had disposed of as a “bit morbid.” Oswald thought the work Peter did neat and good; he had to brush up his own rather faded memories of Huxley’s laboratory in order to keep pace with the boy.

“I wish you’d come to the Glory Hole and look at an old rat I dissected yesterday. I want to get its solar plexus and I’m not sure about it. I’ve been using acetic acid to bring out the nerves, but there’s such a lot of white stuff about....”

The dissection was a good piece of work, the stomach cleaned out and the viscera neatly displayed. Very much in evidence were eight small embryo rats which the specimen under examination, had not science overtaken her, would presently have added to the rat population of the world.

“The old girl’s been going it,” said Peter in a casual tone, and turned these things over with the handle of his scalpel. “Now is all this stuff solar plexus, Nobby?”...

The next morning Oswald stopped short in the middle of his shaving, which in his case involved the most tortuous deflections and grimacings. “It’s all right with the boy,” he said to himself.

“I think it’s all right.

“No nonsense about it anyhow.

“But what a tortuous, untraceable business the coming of knowledge is! Curiosity. A fad for dissecting. An instinct for cleanliness. Pride. A bigger boy like Troop.... Suppose Troop had been a different sort of boy?...

“But then I suppose Peter and he wouldn’t have hit it off together.”

Oswald scraped, and presently his mind tried over a phrase.

“Inherent powers of selection,” said Oswald. “Inherent.... I suppose I picked my way through a pretty queer lot of stuff....”

He stood wiping his safety-razor blade.

“There was more mystery in my time and more emotion. This is better....

“Facts are clean,” said Oswald, uttering the essential faith with which science has faced vice and priestcraft, magic and muddle and fear and mystery, the whole world over.

“Facts are clean.”

§ 13

Joan followed a year after Peter to Cambridge. She entered at Newton Hall. Both Oswald and Aunt Phyllis preferred Newnham to Girton because of the greater freedom of the former college. They agreed that, as Oswald put it, if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well be let right out.

Coming from Highmorton to Newnham was like emerging from some narrow, draughty passage in which one marches muddily with a whispering, giggling hockey team all very much of a sort, into a busy and confused market-place, a rather squabbling and very exciting market-place, in which there is the greatest variety of sorts. And Joan’s mind, too, was opening out in an even greater measure. A year or so ago she was a spirited, intelligent animal, a being of dreams and unaccountable impulses; in a year or so’s time she was to become a shaped and ordered mind, making plans, controlling every urgency, holding herself in relation to a definite conception of herself and the world. We have still to gauge the almost immeasurable receptivity of those three or four crucial years. We have still to grasp what the due use of those years may mean for mankind.

Oswald had been at great pains to find out what was the best education the Empire provided for these two wards of his. But his researches had brought him to realize chiefly how poor and spiritless a thing was the very best formal education that the Empire could offer. It seemed to him, in the bitter urgency of his imperial passion, perhaps even poorer than it was. There was a smattering of Latin, a thinner smattering of Greek, a little patch of Mediterranean history and literature detached from past and future—all university history seemed to Oswald to be in disconnected fragments—but then he would have considered any history fragmentary that did not begin with the geological record and end with a clear tracing of every traceable consequence of the “period” in current affairs; there were mathematical specializations that did not so much broaden the mind as take it into a gully, modern and mediaeval language specializations, philosophical studies that were really not philosophical studies at all but partial examinations of remote and irrelevant systems, the study of a scrap of Plato or Aristotle here, or an excursion (by means of translations) into the Hegelian phraseology there. This sort of thing given out to a few thousand young men, for the most part greatly preoccupied with games, and to a few hundred young women, was all that Oswald could discover by way of mental binding for the entire empire. It seemed to him like innervating a body as big as the world with a brain as big as a pin’s head. As Joan and Peter grew out of school and went up to Cambridge they became more and more aware of a note of lamentation and woe in the voice of their guardian. He talked at them, over their heads at lunch and dinner, to this or that visitor. He also talked to them. But he had a great dread of preachments. They were aware of his general discontent with the education he was giving them, but as yet they had no standards by which to judge his charges. Over their heads his voice argued that the universities would give them no access worth considering to the thoughts and facts of India, Russia, or China, that they were ignoring something stupendous called America, that their political and economic science still neglected the fact that every problem in politics, every problem in the organization of production and social co-operation is a psychological problem; and that all these interests were supremely urgent interests, and how the devil was one going to get these things in? But one thing Joan and Peter did grasp from these spluttering dissertations that flew round and about them. They had to find out all the most important things in life for themselves.

Perhaps the problem of making the teacher of youth an inspiring figure is an insoluble one. At any rate, there was no great stir evoked in Joan and Peter by the personalities of any of their university tutors, lecturers, and professors. These seemed to be for the most part little-spirited, gossiping men. They had also an effect of being underpaid; they had been caught early by the machinery of prize and scholarship, bred, “in the menagerie”; they were men who knew nothing of the world outside, nothing of effort and adventure, nothing of sin and repentance. Not that there were not whispers and scandals about, but such sins as the dons knew of were rather in the nature of dirty affectations, got out of Petronius and Suetonius and practised with a tremendous sense of devilment behind locked doors, than those graver and larger sins that really distress and mar mankind. As Joan and Peter encountered these master minds, they appeared as gowned and capped individuals, hurrying to lecture-rooms, delivering lectures that were often hasty and indistinct, making obscure but caustic allusions to rival teachers, parrying the troublesome inquiring student with an accustomed and often quite pretty wit. With a lesser subtlety and a greater earnestness the women dons had fallen in with this tradition. There were occasional shy personal contacts. But at his tea or breakfast the don was usually too anxious to impress Peter with the idea that he himself was really only a sort of overgrown undergraduate, to produce any other effect at all.

Into the Cambridge lecture rooms and laboratories went Joan and Peter, notebook in hand, and back to digestion in their studies, and presently they went into examination rooms where they vindicated their claim to have attended to textbook and lecture. In addition Peter did some remarkably good sketches of tutors and professors and fellow students. This was their “grind,” Joan and Peter considered, a drill they had to go through; it became them to pass these tests creditably—if only to play the game towards old Nobby. Only with Peter’s specialization in biology did he begin to find any actuality in these processes. He found a charm in phylogenetic speculations; and above the narrow cañons of formal “research” there were fascinating uplands of wisdom. Upon those uplands there lay a light in which even political and moral riddles took on a less insoluble aspect. But going out upon those uplands was straying from the proper work.... Joan got even less from her moral philosophy. Her principal teacher was a man shaped like a bubble, whose life and thought was all the blowing of a bubble. He claimed to have proved human immortality. It was, he said, a very long and severe logical process. About desire, about art, about social association, about love, about God—for he knew also that there was no God—it mattered not what deep question assailed him, this gifted being would dip into his Hegelian suds and blow without apparent effort, and there you were—as wise as when you started! And off the good man would float, infinitely self-satisfied and manifestly absurd.

But even Peter’s biology was only incidentally helpful in answering the fierce questions that life was now thrusting upon him and Joan. Nor had this education linked them up to any great human solidarity. It was like being guided into a forest—and lost there—by queer, absent-minded men. They had no sense of others being there too, upon a common adventure....

“And it is all that I can get for them!” said Oswald. “Bad as it is, it is the best thing there is.”

He tried to find comfort in comparisons.

“Has any country in the world got anything much better?”

§ 14

One day Oswald found himself outside Cambridge on the Huntingdon road. It was when he had settled that Peter was to enter Trinity, and while he was hesitating between Newnham and Girton as Joan’s destiny. There was a little difficulty in discovering Girton. Unlike Newnham, which sits down brazenly in Cambridge, Girton is but half-heartedly at Cambridge, coyly a good mile from the fountains of knowledge, hiding its blushes between tall trees. He was reminded absurdly of a shy, nice girl sitting afar off until father should come out of the public-house....

He fell thinking about the education of women in Great Britain.

At first he had been disposed to think chiefly of Peter’s education and to treat Joan’s as a secondary matter; but little by little, as he watched British affairs close at hand, he had come to measure the mischief feminine illiteracy can do in the world. In no country do the lunch and dinner-party, the country house and personal acquaintance, play so large a part in politics as they do in Great Britain. And the atmosphere of all that inner world of influence is a womanmade atmosphere, and an atmosphere made by women who are for the most part untrained and unread. Here at Girton and Newnham, and at Oxford at Somerville, he perceived there could not be room for a tithe of the girls of the influential and governing classes. Where were the rest? English womanhood was as yet only nibbling at university life. Where were the girls of the peerage, the county-family girls and the like? Their brothers came up, but they stayed at home and were still educated scarcely better than his Aunt Charlotte had been educated forty years ago—by a genteel person, by a sort of mental maid who did their minds as their maids did their hair for the dinner-table.

“No wonder,” he said, “they poison politics and turn it all into personal intrigues. No wonder they want religion to be just a business of personal consolations. No wonder every sort of charlatan and spook dealer, fortune-teller and magic healer flourishes in London. Well, Joan anyhow shall have whatever they can give her here....

“It’s better than nothing. And she’ll talk and read....”

§ 15

But school and university are only the formal part of education. The larger part of the education of every human being is and always has been and must be provided by the Thing that Is. Every adult transaction has as its most important and usually most neglected aspect its effect upon the minds of the young. Behind school and university the Empire itself was undesignedly addressing Joan and Peter. It was, so to speak, gesticulating at them over their teachers’ heads and under their teachers’ arms. It was performing ceremonies and exhibiting spectacles of a highly suggestive nature.

In a large and imposing form certain ideas were steadfastly thrust at Joan and Peter. More particularly was the idolization of the monarchy thrust upon them. In terms of zeal and reverence the press, the pulpit, and the world at large directed the innocent minds of Joan and Peter to the monarch as if that individual were the Reason, the Highest Good and Crown of the collective life. Nothing else in the world of Joan and Peter got anything like the same tremendous show. Their early years were coloured by the reflected glories of the Diamond Jubilee; followed the funeral pomps of Queen Victoria, with much mobbing of negligent or impecunious people not in black by the loyal London crowd; then came the postponed and then the actual coronation of King Edward, public prayings for his health, his stupendous funeral glories; succeeded by the coronation of King George, and finally, about the time that Joan followed Peter up to Cambridge, the Coronation Durbar. The multitude which could not go to India went at least to the Scala cinema, and saw the adoration in all its natural colours. Reverent crowds choked that narrow bystreet. Across all the life and activities of England, across all her intellectual and moral effort, holding up legislation, interfering with industry, stopping the traffic, masking every reality of the collective life, these vast formalities trailed with a magnificent priority. Nothing was respected as they were respected! Sober statesmen were seen invested in strange garments that no sensible person would surely wear except for the gravest reasons; the archbishops and bishops were discovered bent with reverence, invoking the name of God freely, blessing the Crown with the utmost gravity, investing the Sovereign with Robe and Orb, Ring and Sceptre, anointing him with the Golden Coronation Spoon. Either the Crown was itself a matter of altogether supreme importance to the land or else it was the most stupendous foolery that ever mocked and confused the grave realities of a great people’s affairs.

The effect of it upon the minds of our two young people was—complicating. How complicating it is few people realize who have not closely studied the educational process of the British mind as a whole. Then it becomes manifest that the monarch, the state church, and the system of titles and social precedence centering upon the throne, constitute a system of mental entanglements against which British education struggles at an enormous disadvantage. The monarchy in Great Britain is a compromise that was accepted by a generation regardless of education and devoid of any sense of the future. It is now a mask upon the British face; it is a gaudy and antiquated and embarrassing wrapping about the energies of the nation. Because of it Britain speaks to her youth, as to the world, with two voices. She speaks as a democratic republic, just ever so little crowned, and also she speaks as a succulently loyal Teutonic monarchy. Either she is an adolescent democracy whose voice is breaking or an old monarchy at the squeaking stage. Now her voice is the full strong voice of a great people, now it pipes ridiculously. She perplexes the world and stultifies herself.

That was why her education led up to no such magnificent exposition and consolidation of purpose as Oswald dreamt of for his wards. Instead, the track presently lost itself in a maze of prevarications and evasions. The country was double-minded, double-mindedness had become its habit, and it had lost the power of decision. Every effort to broaden and modernize university education in Britain encountered insurmountable difficulties because of this fundamental dispersal of aim. The court got in the way, the country clergy got in the way, the ruling-class families got in the way. It is impossible to turn a wandering, chance-made track into a good road until you know where it is to go. And that question of destination was one that no Englishman before the war could be induced to put into plain language. Doublemindedness had become his second nature. From the very outset it had taken possession of him. When a young American goes to his teacher to ask why he should serve his state, he is shown a flag of thirteen stripes and eight and forty stars and told a very plain and inspiring history. His relations to his country are thenceforward as simple and unquestionable as a child’s to its mother. He may be patriotic or unpatriotic as a son may be dutiful or undutiful, but he will not be muddle-headed. But when Joan and Peter first began to realize that they belonged to the British Empire they were shown a little old German woman and told that reverence for her linked us in a common abjection with the millions of India. They were told also that really this little old lady did nothing of the slightest importance and that the country was the freest democracy on earth, ruled by its elected representatives. And each of these preposterously contradictory stories pursued them in an endless series of variations up to adolescence....

To two naturally clear-headed young people it became presently as palpably absurd to have a great union of civilized states thus impersonated as it is to have Wall impersonated by Snout the Tinker in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They were already jeering at royalty and the church with Aunt Phyllis long before they went up to Cambridge. There they found plenty of associates to jeer with them. And there too they found a quite congenial parallel stream of jeering against Parliament, which pretended to represent the national mind and quality, but which was elected by a method that manifestly gave no chance to any candidate who was not nominated by a party organization. In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men’s minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun. Joan and Peter grew up to the persuasion that the crown above them was rather a good joke, and that Parliament and its jobs and party flummery were also a joke, and that the large, deep rottenness in this British world about them was perhaps in the nature of things and anyhow beyond their altering. They too were becoming double-minded according to the tradition of the land.

Yet beneath this acquiescence in the deep-rooted political paradox of Britain they were capable of the keenest interest in a number of questions that they really believed were alive. It became manifest to them that this great golden preposterous world was marred by certain injustices and unkindnesses. Something called Labour they heard was unhappy and complained of unfair treatment, certain grumblings came from India and Ireland, and there was a curiously exciting subject which demanded investigation and reforming activities called the sex question. And generally there seemed to be, for no particular reason, a lot of restrictions upon people’s conduct.

In addition Peter had acquired from Oswald, rather by way of example than precept, a very definite persuasion, and Joan had acquired a persuasion that was perhaps not quite so clearly and deeply cut, that to make it respectable there ought to be something in one’s life in the nature of special work. In Oswald’s case it was his African interest. Peter thought that his own work might perhaps be biological. But that one’s work ought to join on to the work of the people or that all the good work in the world should make one whole was a notion that had not apparently entered Peter’s mind. Oswald with his dread of preachments was doubtful about any deliberate dissertations in the matter. He got Peter to begin the Martyrdom of Man, which had so profoundly affected his own life, but Peter expressed doubts about the correctness of Reade’s Egyptian history, and put the book aside and did not go on reading it.

At times Oswald tried to say something to Joan and Peter of his conception of the Empire as a great human enterprise, playing a dominating part in the establishment of a world peace and a world civilization, and giving a form and direction and pride to every life within it. But these perpetual noises of royalty in its vulgarest, most personal form, the loyalist chatter of illiterate women and the clamour of the New Imperialism to “tax the foreigner” and exploit the empire for gain, drowned his intention while it was still unspoken in his mind. There were moments when he could already ask himself whether this empire he had shaped his life to serve, this knightly empire of his, enlightened, righteous, and predominant, was anything better than a dream—or a lie.

§ 16

When Joan left Highmorton she came into the market-place of ideas. She began to read the newspaper. She ceased to be a leggy person with a skirt like a kilt and a dark shock of hair not under proper control; instead, she became visibly a young lady, albeit a very young young lady, and suddenly all adult conversation was open to her.

Under the brotherly auspices of Peter she joined the Cambridge University Fabian Society. Peter belonged to it, but he explained that he didn’t approve of it. He was in it for its own good. She also took a place in two suffrage organizations, and subscribed to three suffrage papers. Tel Wymark, who was also in Newton Hall, introduced her to the Club of Strange Faiths, devoted to “the impartial examination of all religious systems.” And she went under proper escort to the First Wednesday in Every Month Teas in Bunny Cuspard’s rooms. Bunny was an ex-collegiate student, he had big, comfortable rooms in Siddermorton Street, and these gatherings of his were designed to be discussions, very memorable discussions of the most advanced type, about this and that. As a matter of fact they consisted in about equal proportions of awkward silences, scornful treatment of current reputations, and Bunny, in a loose, inaccurate way, spilling your tea or handing you edibles. Bunny’s cakes and sandwiches were wonderful; in that respect he was a born hostess. Junior dons and chance visitors to Cambridge would sometimes drift in to Bunny’s intellectual feasts, and here it was that Joan met young Winterbaum again.

Young Winterbaum was rather a surprise. He had got his features together astonishingly since the days of Miss Murgatroyd’s school; he had grown a moustache, much more of a moustache than Peter was to have for years yet, and was altogether remarkably grown up and a man of the world. “Funny lot,” he remarked to Joan when he had sat down beside her. “Why do you come to Cambridge?”

“My people make me come up here,” he explained; “family considerations, duty to the old country, loyalty to the old college, and all that. But I’d rather be painting. It’s the only live thing just now. You up to anything?”

“Ears and eyes and mouth wide open,” said Joan.

“This show isn’t worth it. Do you ever drift towards Chelsea?”

Joan said she went to Hampstead now and then; she stayed sometimes with the Sheldricks, who were in a congested house on Downshire Hill now, and sometimes with Miss Jepson. Henceforth, now that she was no longer under the Highmorton yoke, she hoped to be in London oftener.

“Did you see the Picasso show?” asked Winterbaum.

She had not.

“You missed something,” said young Winterbaum, just like old times. “Picasso, Mancini; these are the gods of my idolatry....”

Bunny Cuspard interrupted clumsily with some specially iced cakes. Joan, accepting a cake, discovered Wilmington talking absent-mindedly to her chaperon and looking Pogroms at Winterbaum. So Joan, pleased rather than excited by this chance evidence of a continuing interest, lifted up a face of bright recognition and smiled and nodded to Wilmington....

It was the ambition of Mrs. Sheldrick and her remaining daughters—some of them had married—to make their home on Downshire Hill “a little bit of the London Quartier Latin.”

Mr. Sheldrick had worn out the large, loose, tweed suit that had held him together for so long, he had gone to pieces altogether and was dead and buried, and the Sheldricks were keeping a home together by the practice of decorative arts and promiscuous hospitalities. Mrs. Sheldrick was writing a little in the papers of the weaker among the various editors who lived within her social range; little vague reviews and poems she wrote, with a quiet smile, that were not so much allusive as with an air of having recently had a flying visit from an allusion that was unable to stay. Sydney Sheldrick was practising sculpture, and Babs was attending the London School of Dramatic Art, to which Adela Murchison had also found her way. Antonia, the eldest, was in business, making djibbah-like robes.

There was downstairs and the passage and staircase and upstairs, a sitting-room in front, and a sort of oriental lounge (that later in the evening became the bedroom of Antonia and Babs) behind. It had all been decorated in the most modern style by Antonia in a very blue blue that seemed a little threadbare in places and very large, suggestive shapes of orange, with a sort of fringe of black and white chequers and a green ceiling with harsh pink stars. And the chairs, except for the various ottomans and cosy corners which were in faded blue canvas, had been painted bright pink or grey.

Into this house they gathered, after nine and more particularly on Saturdays, all sorts of people who chanced to be connected by birth, marriage, misfortune, or proclivity with journalism or the arts. Hither came Aunt Phœbe Stubland, and read a paper called insistently: Watchman, What of the Night? What of it? and quite up to its title; and hither too came Aunt Phyllis Stubland, quietly observant. But quite a lot of writers came. And in addition there were endless conspirators. There was Mrs. O’Grady, the beautiful Irish patriot, who was always dressed like a procession of Hibernians in New York, and there was Patrick Lynch, a long, lax black object, ending below in large dull boots, and above in a sad white face under wiry black hair, grieving for ever that grief for Ireland—Cathleen ni Houlihan and all the rest of it—that only these long, black, pale Irishmen can understand. And there was Eric Schmidt, who was rare among Irish patriots because of his genuine knowledge of Erse. All these were great conspirators. Then there was Mrs. Punk, who had hunger-struck three times, and Miss Corcoran-Deeping the incendiary. And American socialists. And young Indians. And one saw the venerable figure of Mr. Woodjer, very old now and white and deaf and nervous and indistinct, who had advocated in several beautiful and poetical little volumes a new morality that would have put the wind up of the Cities of the Plain. And Winterbaum drifted in, but cautiously, as doubting whether it wasn’t just “a bit too marginal,” to bring away his two frizzy-haired sisters, very bright-eyed and eager, rapid-speaking and au fait, and wonderfully bejewelled for creatures so young. They were going in for dancing; they did Spanish dances, stupendously clicking down their red heels with absolute precision together; they took the Sheldricks on the way to the Contangos or the Mondaines or the Levisons, or even to the Hoggenheimers; they glittered at Downshire Hill like birds of Paradise, and had the loveliest necks and shoulders and arms. Outside waited young Winterbaum’s coupé—a very smart little affair in black and cream, with an electric starter wonderfully fitted.

Here too came young Huntley, who had written three novels before he was twenty-two, and who was now thirty and quite well known, not only as a novelist of reputation, but as a critic eminently unpopular with actor managers; a blond young man with a strong profile, a hungry, scornful expression and a greedy, large blue eye that wandered about the crush as if it sought something, until it came to rest upon Joan. Thereafter Mr. Huntley’s other movements and conversation were controlled by a resolution to edge towards and overshadow and dominate Joan with the profile as much as possible.

Joan, by various delicacies of perception, was quite aware of these approaches without seeming at any time to regard Huntley directly; and by a subtlety quite imperceptible to him she drifted away from each advance. She did not know who he was, and though the profile interested her, his steadfast advance towards her seemed to be premature. Until suddenly an apparently quite irrelevant incident spun her mind round to the idea of encouraging him.

The incident was the arrival of Peter.

Early in the afternoon he had vanished from Mrs. Jepson’s, where he and Joan were staying; he had not come in to dinner, and now suddenly he appeared conspicuously in this gathering of the Sheldricks’, conspicuously in the company of Hetty Reinhart, who was to Joan, for quite occult reasons, the most detestable of all his large circle of detestable friends. That alone was enough to tax the self-restraint of an exceedingly hot-tempered foster sister. (So this was what Peter had been doing with his time! This had been his reason for neglecting his own household! At the Petit Riche, or some such place—with her! A girl with a cockney accent! A girl who would stroke your arm as soon as speak to you!...) But though the larger things in life strain us, it is the smaller things that break us. What finally turned Joan over was a glance, a second’s encounter with Peter’s eye. Hetty had sailed forward with that extraordinary effect of hers of being a grown-up, experienced woman, to greet Mrs. Sheldrick, and Peter stood behind, disregarded. (His expression of tranquil self-satisfaction was maddening.) His eye went round the room looking, Joan knew, for two people. It rested on Joan.

The question that Peter was asking Joan mutely across the room was in effect this: “Are you behaving yourself, Joan?”

Then, not quite reassured by an uncontrollable scowl, Peter looked away to see if some one else was present. Some one else apparently wasn’t present, and Joan was unfeignedly sorry.

He was looking for Mir Jelalludin, the interesting young Indian with the beautifully modelled face, whom Joan had met and talked to at the Club of Strange Faiths. At the Club of Strange Faiths one day she had been suddenly moved to make a short speech about the Buddhist idea of Nirvana, which one of the speakers had described as extinction. Making a speech to a little meeting was not a very difficult thing for Joan; she had learnt how little terrible a thing is to do in the Highmorton debating society, where she had been sustained by a grim determination to score off Miss Frobisher. She said that she thought the real intention was not extinction at all, but the escape of the individual consciousness after its living pilgrimage from one incarnate self to another into the universal consciousness. That was the very antithesis of extinction; one lost oneself indeed, but one lost oneself not in darkness and non-existence, but in light and the fullness of existence. There was all the difference between a fainting fit and ecstasy between these two conceptions. And it was true of experience that one was least oneself, least self-conscious and egotistical at one’s time of greatest excitement.

Mir Jelalludin received these remarks with earnest applause. He made as if to speak after her, rose in his place, and then hastily sat down. Afterwards he came and spoke to her, quite modestly and simply, without the least impertinence.

He explained, with a pleasant staccato accent and little slips in his pronunciation that suggested restricted English conversation and much reading of books, how greatly he had been wanting to say just what she had said, “so bew-ti-fully,” but he had been restrained by “impafction of the pronunsation. So deefi’clt, you know.” One heard English people so often not doing justice to Indian ideas so that it was very pleasant to hear them being quite sympathetically put.

There was something very pleasing in the real intellectual excitement that had made him speak to her, and there was something very pleasing to the eye in the neat precision with which his brown features were chiselled and the decisive accuracy of every single hair on his brow. He was, he explained, a Moslem, but he was interested in every school of Indian thought. He was afraid he was not very orthodox, and he showed a smile of the most perfect teeth. There had always been a tendency to universalism in Indian thought, that affected even the Moslem. Did she know anything of the Brahmo Somaj? Had she read any novel of Chatterji’s? There was at least one great novel of his the English ought to read, the Ananda Math. No one could understand Indian thought properly who had not read it. He had a translation of it into English—which he would lend her.

Would she be interested to read it?

Might he send it to her?

Joan’s chaperon was a third year girl who put no bar upon these amenities. Joan accepted the book and threw out casually that she sometimes went to Bunny Cuspard’s teas. If Mr. Jelalludin sent her Chatterji’s book she could return it to Bunny Cuspard’s rooms.

It was in Bunny Cuspard’s room that Peter had first become aware of this exotic friendship. He discovered his Joan snugly in a corner listening to an explanation of the attitude of Islam towards women. It had been enormously misrepresented in Christendom. Mr. Jelalludin was very earnest in his exposition, and Joan listened with a pleasant smile and regarded him pleasantly and wished that she could run her fingers just once along his eyebrow without having her motives misunderstood.

But at the sight of his Joan engaged in this confabulation Peter suddenly discovered all the fiercest traits of race pride. He fretted about the room and was rude to other people and watched a book change hands, and waited scarcely twenty seconds after the end of Joan’s conversation before he came up to her.

“I say, Joan,” he said, “you can’t go chumming with Indians anyhow.”

“Peter,” she said, “we’ve chummed with India.”

“Oh, nonsense! Not socially. Their standards are different.”

“I hope they are,” said Joan. “The way you make these Indian boys here feel like outcasts is disgraceful.”

“They’re different. The men aren’t uncivil to them. But it isn’t for you——”

“It’s for all English people to treat them well. He’s a charming young man.”

“It isn’t done, Joan.”

“It’s going to be, Petah.”

“You’re meeting him again?”

“If I think proper.”

“Oh!” said Peter, baffled for the time. “All right, Joan.”

A fierce exchange of notes followed. “Don’t you understand the fellow’s a polygamist?” Peter wrote. “He keeps his women in purdah. No decent woman could be talked to in India as he talked to you. Not even an introduction. Personally, I’ve no objection to any friends you make provided they are decent friends....”

“He isn’t a polygamist,” Joan replied. “I’ve asked him. And every one says he’s a first-rate cricketer. As for decent friends, Peter——”

The issue had been still undecided when they came down for the Christmas vacation.

So far Joan had maintained her positions without passion. But now suddenly her indignation at Peter’s interference flared to heaven. That he should come here, hot from Soho, to tyrannize over her! Indians indeed! As if Hetty Reinhart wasn’t worse than a Gold Coast nigger!...

The only outward manifestation of this wild storm of resentment had been her one instant’s scowl at Peter. Thereafter Joan became again the quiet, intelligently watchful young woman she had been all that evening. But now she turned herself through an angle of about thirty degrees towards Huntley, who was talking to old Mrs. Jex, the wonder of Hampstead, who used to know George Eliot and Huxley, the while he was regarding Joan with sidelong covetousness. Joan lifted her eyes towards him with an expression of innocent interest. The slightly projecting blue eyes seemed to leap in response.

Mrs. Jex was always rather inattentive to her listener when she was reciting her reminiscences, and Huntley was able to turn away from her quietly without interrupting the flow.

The Sheldrick circle scorned the formalities of introductions. “Are you from the Slade school?” said Huntley.

“Cambridge,” said Joan.

“My name’s Gavan Huntley.”

But this was going to be more amusing than Joan had expected. This was a real live novelist—Joan’s first. Not a fortnight ago she had read The Pernambuco Bunshop, and thought it rather clever and silly.

“Not the Gavan Huntley?” she said.

His face became faintly luminous with satisfaction. “Just Gavan Huntley,” he said with a large smile.

“The Pernambuco Bunshop?” she said.

“Guilty,” he pleaded, smiling still more naïvely.

One had expected something much less natural in a novelist.

“I loved it,” said Joan, and Huntley was hers to do what she liked with. Joan’s idea of a proper conversation required it to be in a corner. “Do Sheldricks never sit down?” she asked. “I’ve been standing all the evening.”

“They can’t,” he said confidentially. “They’re the other sort of Dutch doll, the cheap sort, that hasn’t got joints at the knees.”

“Antonia sometimes leans against the wall.”

“Her utmost. The next thing would be to sit on the floor with her legs straight out. I’ve seen her do that. But there is a sort of bench on the staircase landing.”

Thither they made their way, and there presently Peter found them.

He found them because he was making for that very corner in the company of Sydney Sheldrick. “Hullo!” said Sydney. “That you, Joan?”

“We’ve taken this corner for the evening,” said Huntley, laying a controlling hand on Joan’s pretty wrist.

Joan and Peter regarded each other darkly.

“There ought to be more seats about somewhere,” said Sydney. “Come up to the divan, old Peter....”

Of course Peter must object to Huntley. They were scarcely out of the Sheldricks’ house when he began. “That man Huntley’s a bad egg, Joan. Everybody knows it.”

For a time they disputed about Huntley.

“Peter,” said Joan, with affected calm, “is there any man, do you think, to whom so—so untrustworthy a girl as I am might safely talk?”

Peter seemed to consider. “There’s chaps like Troop,” he said.

“Troop!” said Joan, relying on her intonation.

“It isn’t that you’re untrustworthy,” said Peter.

“Fragile?”

“It’s the look and tone of things.”

“I wonder how you get these ideas.”

“What ideas?”

“Of how I behave in a corner with Jelalludin or Gavan Huntley.”

“I haven’t suggested anything.”

“You’ve suggested everything. Do you think I collect stray kisses like Sydney Sheldrick? Do you think I’m a dirty little—little—cocotte like Hetty Reinhart?”

“Joan!”

“Well,” said Joan savagely, and said no more.

Peter came to the defence of Hetty belatedly. “How can you say such things of Hetty?” he asked. “What can you know about her?”

“Pah! I can smell what she is across a room. Do you think I’m an absolute young fool, Peter?”

“You’ve got no right, Joan——”

“Why argue, Peter, why argue? When things are plain. Can’t you go your own way, Peter”—Joan was annoyed to find suddenly that she was weeping. Tears were running down her face. But the road was dark, and perhaps if she gave no sign Peter would not see. “You go your own way, Peter, go your own way, and let me go mine.”

Peter was silent for a little while. Then compunction betrayed itself in his voice.

“It’s you I’m thinking of, Joan. I can’t bear to see you make yourself cheap.”

“Cheap! And you?”

“I’m different. I’m altogether different. A man is.”

Silence for a time. Joan seemed to push back her hair, and so smeared the tears from her face.

“We interfere with each other,” she said at last. “We interfere with each other. What is the good of it? You’ve got to go your way and I’ve got to go mine. We used to have fun—lots of fun. Now....”

She couldn’t say any more for a while.

“I’m going my own way, Peter. It’s a different way——Leave me alone. Keep off!”

They said no more. When they got in they found Miss Jepson sitting by the fire, and she had got them some cocoa and biscuits. The headache that had kept her from the Sheldrick festival had lifted, and Joan plunged at once into a gay account of the various people she had seen that evening—saving and excepting Gavan Huntley. But Peter stood by the fireplace, silent, looking down into the fire, sulking or grieving. All the while that Joan rattled on to Miss Jepson she was watching him with almost imperceptible glances and wondering whether he sulked or grieved. Did he feel as she felt? If he sulked—well, confound him! But what if this perplexing dissension hurt him as much as it was hurting her!

§ 18

Joan had long since lost that happiness, that perfect assurance, that intense appreciation of the beauty in things which had come to her with early adolescence. She was troubled and perplexed in all her ways. She was full now of stormy, indistinct desires and fears, and a gnawing, indefinite impatience. No religion had convinced her of a purpose in her life, neither Highmorton nor Cambridge had suggested any mundane devotion to her, nor pointed her ambitions to a career. The only career these feminine schools and colleges recognized was a career of academic successes and High School teaching, intercalated with hunger strikes for the Vote, and Joan had early decided she would rather die than teach in a High School. Nor had she the quiet assurance her own beauty would have given her in an earlier generation of a discreet choice of lovers and marriage and living “happily ever afterwards.” She had a horror of marriage lurking in her composition; Mrs. Pybus and Highmorton had each contributed to that; every one around her spoke of it as an entire abandonment of freedom. Moreover there was this queerness about her birth—she was beginning to understand better now in what that queerness consisted—that seemed to put her outside the customary ceremonies of veil and orange blossoms. Why did they not tell her all about it—what her mother was and where her mother was? It must be a pretty awful business, if neither Aunt Phyllis nor Aunt Phœbe would ever allude to it. It would have to come out—perhaps some monstrous story—before she could marry. And who could one marry? She could not conceive herself marrying any of these boys she met, living somewhere cooped up in a little house with solemn old Troop, or under the pursuing eyes, the convulsive worship, of Wilmington. She had no object in life, no star by which to steer, and she was full of the fever of life. She was getting awfully old. She was eighteen. She was nineteen. Soon she would be twenty.

All her being, in her destitution of any other aim that had the slightest hold upon her imagination, was crying out for a lover.

It was a lover she wanted, not a husband; her mind made the clearest distinction between the two. He would come and unrest would cease, confusion would cease and beauty would return. Her lover haunted all her life, an invisible yet almost present person. She could not imagine his face nor his form, he was the blankest of beings, and yet she was so sure she knew him that if she were to see him away down a street or across a crowded room, instantly, she believed, she would recognize him. And until he came life was a torment of suspense. Life was all wrong and discordant, so wrong and discordant that at times she could have hated her lover for keeping her waiting so wretchedly.

And she had to go on as though this suspense was nothing. She had to disregard this vast impatience of her being. And the best way to do that, it seemed to her, was to hurry from one employment to another, never to be alone, never without some occupation, some excitement. Her break with Peter had an extraordinary effect of release in her mind. Hitherto, whatever her resentment had been she had admitted in practice his claim to exact a certain discretion from her; his opinion had been, in spite of her resentment, a standard for her. Now she had no standard at all—unless it was a rebellious purpose to spite him. On Joan’s personal conduct the thought of Oswald, oddly enough, had scarcely any influence at all. She adored him as one might a political or historical hero; she wanted to stand well in his sight, but the idea of him did not pursue her into the details of her behaviour at all. He seemed preoccupied with ideas and unobservant. She had never had any struggle with him; he had never made her do anything. And as for Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe—while the latter seemed to make vague gestures towards quite unutterable liberties, the former maintained an attitude of nervous disavowal. She was a woman far too uncertain-minded for plain speaking. She was a dear. Clearly she hated cruelty and baseness; except in regard to such things she set no bounds.

Hitherto Joan had had a very few flirtations; the extremest thing upon her conscience was Bunny Cuspard’s kiss. She had the natural shilly-shally of a girl; she was strongly moved to all sorts of flirtings and experimentings with love, and very adventurous and curious in these matters; and also she had a system of inhibitions, pride, hesitation, fastidiousness, and something beyond these things, a sense of some ultimate value that might easily be lost, that held her back. Rebelling against Peter had somehow also set her rebelling against these restraints. Why shouldn’t she know this and that? Why shouldn’t she try this and that? Why, for instance, was she always “shutting up” Adela whenever she began to discourse in her peculiar way upon the great theme? Just a timid prude she had been, but now——.

And all this about undesirable people and unseemly places, all this picking and choosing as though the world was mud; what nonsense it was! She could take care of herself surely!

She began deliberately to feel her way through all her friendships to see whether this thing, passion, lurked in any of them. It was an interesting exercise of her wits to try over a youth like old Troop, for example; to lure him on by a touch of flattery, a betrayal of warmth in her interest, to reciprocal advances. At first Troop wasn’t in the least in love with her, but she succeeded in suggesting to him that he was. But the passion in him released an unsuspected fund of egotistical discourse; he developed a disposition to explain himself and his mental operations in a large, flattering way both by word of mouth and by letter. Even when he was roused to a sense of her as lovable, he did not become really interested in her but only in his love for her. He arrived at one stride at the same unanalytical acceptance of her as of his God and the Church and the King and his parents and all the rest of the Anglican system of things. She was his girl—“the kid.” He really wasn’t interested in those other things any more than he was in her; once he had given her her rôle in relation to him his attention returned to himself. The honour, integrity, and perfection of Troop were the consuming occupations of his mind. This was an edifying thing to discover, but not an entertaining thing to pursue; and after a time Joan set herself to avoid, miss, and escape from Troop on every possible occasion. But Troop prided himself upon his persistence. He took to writing her immense, ill-spelt, manly letters, with sentences beginning: “You understand me very little if——.” It was clear he was hers only until some simpler, purer, more receptive and acquisitive girl swam into his ken.

Wilmington, on the other hand, was a silent covetous lover. Joan could make him go white, but she could not make him talk. She was a little afraid of him and quite sure of him. But he was not the sort of young man one can play with, and she marvelled greatly that any one could desire her so much and amuse her so little. Bunny Cuspard was a more animated subject for experiment, and you could play with him a lot. He danced impudently. He could pat Joan’s shoulder, press her hand, slip his arm round her waist and bring his warm face almost to a kissing contact as though it was all nothing. Did these approaches warm her blood? Did she warm his? Anyhow it didn’t matter, and it wasn’t anything.

Then there was Graham Prothero, a very good-looking friend of Peter’s, whom she had met while skating. He had a lively eye, and jumped after a meeting or so straight into Joan’s dreams, where he was still more lively and good-looking. She wished she knew more certainly whether she had got into his dreams.

Meanwhile Joan’s curiosity had not spared Jelalludin. She had had him discoursing on the beauties of Indian love, and spinning for her imagination a warm moonlight vision of still temples reflected in water tanks, of silvery water shining between great lily leaves, of music like the throbbing of a nerve, of brown bodies garlanded with flowers. There had been a loan of Rabindranath Tagore’s love poems. And once he had sent her some flowers.

Any of these youths she could make her definite lover she knew, by an act of self-adaptation and just a little reciprocal giving. Only she had no will to do that. She felt she must not will anything of the sort. The thing must come to her; it must take possession of her. Sometimes, indeed, she had the oddest fancy that perhaps suddenly one of these young men would become transfigured; would cease to be his clumsy, ineffective self, and change right into that wonderful, that compelling being who was to set all things right. There were moments when it seemed about to happen. And then the illusion passed, and she saw clearly that it was just old Bunny or just staccato Mir Jelalludin.