CHAPTER I

Miss Onoria Strickland lived in a semi-detached villa, and had no nonsense about her. Many women repose through life upon lesser attributes, they may have a handsome profile, a gift for putting on their clothes, a skilful tongue, or a kind heart. But Miss Strickland found rest in none of these minor alleviations of the spirit; she took her stand triumphantly upon her direct common sense.

No one could beat her there. “What,” she would ask herself as she came to any crisis in her life or in the lives of her neighbours, “is the most sensible thing to do?” And when she had answered this question, she did it; or in cases where an action of her own was not indicated, she ordered it to be done by others.

She had lived at Little Ticklington for forty-five years, and all this time she had had her eyes open and said whatever came into her head, under the impression that she was expressing a peculiarly pure form of truth.

Her friends depended upon her and feared her. When they didn’t want to depend upon her they got out of her way.

Miss Strickland was continually discovering the deceitfulness of human nature but she never laid her finger upon its cause.

She did not realise that the only way to keep on good terms with an aggressive personality is by the constant practice of evasion.

Miss Onoria Strickland was an exemplary citizen. She had earned her own living with talent and success from the age of twenty-one, and she had been a masterful but helpful daughter to her aged parents. They aged a little prematurely under this assistance, and died within a year of each other.

Opinion in Little Ticklington agreed that neither could support the full weight of Onoria’s attentions without the other.

She nursed them to the last with a rigid application of common sense, which took the wind out of the local doctor’s sails. There was nothing left for him to suggest but medicines, and these were ineffectual.

Onoria had never felt lonely during the lifetime of her parents.

She left home at nine o’clock every morning and returned at five o’clock in the afternoon, except on Saturday, when she came back to lunch.

No one could have had a fuller life; she managed her parents, did the household accounts, worked in the garden, or took Prendergast for a walk. Prendergast was a pug dog of a self-centred and exacting nature. He had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Strickland by an old friend of that name, and though Onoria had protested against the use of a surname for a pet dog, as unsuitable and even ridiculous, her father and mother had insisted querulously and unitedly that they wanted to call the pug “Prendergast” as a last tribute to their deceased friend; and as they were at this time feeble, and it was bad for them to insist, Onoria had wisely let her protest drop.

After her parents’ death, Prendergast became the pivot upon which the household turned. Onoria was not sensible about Prendergast: she adored him. He was the one licensed folly of her ordered life.

It must not be supposed that Romance had passed Onoria by.

It had fallen at her feet early in life, and when she discovered how much nonsense it had about it, she had kicked it ruthlessly away.

No one will ever know why Peter Gubbins worshipped Miss Strickland. He was a gentle, inoffensive youth, with a weak chin and bottle-neck shoulders; his strongest tastes were for magazines and barley sugar, and though he was easily convinced that he was unsuitable, he continued to worship Onoria in a melancholy but resigned manner for twenty years.

Peter Gubbins was her next-door neighbour, and as the years went on a certain element of relief mingled with his melancholy.

Miss Strickland had a piercing voice which swept across the garden, over the wall which divided their retreats; but there was a wall.

Mr. Gubbins, who was extremely fond of poetry, often thought of those lines in “Maud” which assure her that if she were to pass near the final resting place of her lover: his “heart would hear her and beat,” had he “lain for a century dead.” Mr. Gubbins was under the impression that his own heart would act in a precisely similar manner should Onoria visit his grave. Mr. Gubbins had a large Tabby cat called Samson, of which he was inordinately proud.

Samson did not so much return, as passively accept, his master’s nervous devotion.

He was inconsiderate about sleeping in a basket. Inflexible arrangements, when they were not his own, galled him; and though he knew his name perfectly, he had never been known to answer to it, unless he had reason to believe that fish was at the other end.

Peter Gubbins was very fond of all small and reasonably gentle animals, and often took Prendergast for a walk if Miss Strickland hadn’t time.

Prendergast accompanied Mr. Gubbins for the sake of the walk, but he made it perfectly plain from the first (just as Miss Strickland herself had done) that he thought nothing of Peter Gubbins as a companion.

Mr. Gubbins made himself useful in other ways. He really knew a great deal more about gardens than Onoria did, and he loved them—under his breath as it were—because Onoria was always pointing out to him how much rubbish was talked and written upon the subject of gardens. The Garden of Eden had started the topic, and no one had been able to let it alone since.

Peter Gubbins had a private income and wrote occasional articles and poems for magazines. The articles dealt with sweet peas, on which he was an expert, and Roman Catholicism, on which he was not, but by dint of studying the works of ex-nuns and monks, he had arrived at some very startling theories upon the Roman Catholic religion suitable for very low church magazines. The poems were on certain aspects of nature which have unfortunately occurred to other persons in search of poetic subjects; still they were occasionally published and Mr. Gubbins signed them “Sirius.” (As he often wrote about stars, and always referred to them as “bright,” his signature could not have been more appropriate.) Obviously “Peter Gubbins” applauding the universe would not do.

He never showed the poems to Onoria, but they shared the articles on Rome, and sometimes Onoria liked them, though she felt them to be too milk and watery to do real justice to the subject. It was inconsistent of Onoria to have such a decided bias against Rome, for she was very fond of law and order, and considered authority final. She said “This settles it” about a dozen times a day, and no Pope has ever made more ex-cathedra proclamations in the twenty-four hours.

Mr. Gubbins was by no means Onoria’s greatest man friend; she merely saw him the most.

Men liked Onoria, and Onoria liked men.

Whether she had a secret passion for any of the more virile types of Little Ticklington will never be known.

Onoria did not shriek her emotional history upon house-tops, and as far as the relations of the sexes were concerned, she was not modern—that is to say she thought there should be no relation except marriage; and even that should be concealed as far as possible.

Women she despised.

Men sought Onoria to tell her what they felt for other women, they talked politics with her, and they took a monstrous and secret pleasure in hearing her abuse her own sex; but with the exception of Mr. Gubbins they did not propose to share their lives with Onoria; they preferred the weaker sisters whom Onoria had relentlessly dissected for their special delectation.

They enjoyed watching this merciless analysis of a suspected sex, but in spite of their suspicions they married the subjects of the analysis.

Onoria hated women. It may have been because she had been an only girl in a family of five, and that certain limitations and inhibitions brought home to her early in life the disabilities of her sex without the compensating spiritual advantages which occur later; or it may have been that something in herself warned her that her most marked qualities were not those that succeed in attracting, where qualities less marked and perhaps less worthy of attention prevail. Each of her brothers in turn gave themselves over without reprieve to an incarnate devil.

This is not their own account of the transaction; they were under the impression that they had married singularly delightful types of womanhood, but Onoria found these women out, tried them in the furnace of her fraternal love and told them roundly what she thought of them.

The result of freedom of speech is often the separation of families. Onoria quarrelled bitterly and irretrievably with each of her sisters-in-law in turn, and never went near any of them again.

She referred to her brothers as “poor dear So-and-So”—in the manner of the pious whose dead are in the hands of the Lord. She sometimes saw them in neutral places, and she sent her nephews and nieces handsome presents at Christmas, especially her nephews.

When Onoria asserted that her family had been ruined by women, she firmly believed this to be the fact. People who invariably speak the truth are sometimes misled as to the nature of fact; it is so difficult for truthful natures to realise that they are not in possession of the whole of that evasive quality.

At the High School Onoria taught nothing but girls. She taught them music and singing with bitterness and with boredom for over twenty years, and she taught them exceedingly well.

There is an excellent poem which asserts that “He who only rules by terror does a grievous wrong,” and there is no doubt a good deal to be said for this theory.

All Onoria’s pupils would have agreed to it with rapture; still you do not go down the path of least resistance often if you find lions in the way.

Even girls have the sense to make unusual efforts to avoid unusual inconveniences, and Miss Strickland’s temper when roused was an unusual inconvenience. She said everything that came into her head against the girl who had failed her, and then, with the sting of a life-long prejudice behind her, everything against the sex which had evolved her.

Onoria firmly believed that all girls were deceitful, lazy and vain, and that the only way to deal with them was by repeated castigations of the spirit.

Some of her pupils would have done better without these reprisals; most people are supposed to work best under appreciation and do not begin to find themselves until they have the confidence and sympathy of their teachers. Such girls did not do their best work for Onoria; but they worked. All of them worked, feverishly or steadily, to avoid the deluge of her merciless tongue.

The level of Onoria’s pupils was high, and as she did not believe in hidden depths, she never had to regret that she had failed to plumb them.

“I know exactly what each of my girls can do,” she was fond of saying. What she did not know was what the girls could have done if they hadn’t been hers.

“I have never made a friend out of a pupil yet, thank the Lord,” she would end up by saying to her men friends, who spent Sunday afternoons in hearing Onoria undermine the position of women, “and what is more I never will!” The men shook their heads in delighted admiration; they knew they could not say as much for themselves; but they admired Onoria for her security.

CHAPTER II

Elsie Andrews was exactly the kind of girl Miss Strickland disliked most. Nobody really liked Elsie very much because it is difficult to like a child who constantly squirms. She went, at school, by the name of “The Worm.” The young have an unconscious preference for success or the materials of success, and no one could have imagined a success being made of Elsie.

She had long, greasy, dark hair which fell perfectly straight down her back, and was the colour of a wet haystack. Her eyes were small and rather weak, her chin receded, and her complexion was a pale fawn colour.

She came into a room as if she were holding herself together with difficulty, and was unpleasantly conscious of having broken the Ten Commandments. If she had really broken them there would have been some sense in it; but she never broke anything except the points of her pencils.

Miss Strickland did not notice her, except to tell her to sit up, or to get out of the way.

It came as a shock to the whole school when it learned that Elsie had petitioned to be allowed to take music lessons from Miss Strickland, instead of from the less accomplished but much milder teacher provided for the younger girls.

It was like asking to be led into a lion’s den without having evinced the slightest aptitude for being a Daniel.

It was supposed that Miss Strickland would make short work of her, and that after the first or second music lesson Elsie’s whitened bones would be left outside the music room door.

Miss Strickland herself, staring at the small bowed figure on the music stool, felt as a rose fancier might feel if asked to entertain the most noxious of the caterpillars.

Here was a true type of feminine nature—a prevaricating, vacillating, cowardly little girl; and Elsie was vain too, or how would she have dared to claim the best teacher in the school for presumably the worst pupil?

She so exemplified everything that Miss Strickland felt women in general were, without any of the attractions which, in the eyes of the undiscriminating, outweigh these disadvantages, that Miss Strickland felt a certain kindliness rise in her—the kindliness of a prophet who sees his worst prognostications blossom into disastrous facts.

“May I ask what you think you know about music?” she shot out at the child with a twist of her determined chin.

This was Miss Strickland’s usual preliminary to a campaign of slaughter, and all new pupils, even if she had a kindly feeling towards them, had to be slaughtered first.

Elsie choked, looked helplessly at her limp little fingers, and stammered, “Nothing, please!”

Miss Strickland did not appear in the least mollified by this collapse of confidence.

“Under the circumstances,” she replied with the easy smartness of a licensed bully, “can you tell me why the teacher for the younger girls was not considered sufficiently good for you?”

There was a breathless silence before Elsie, with an astonishing spasm of courage, answered,

“I shouldn’t have learned anything from her, please.”

“ ‘Couldn’t’ is no doubt what you mean,” said Miss Strickland with genial irony. “And ‘couldn’t’ will be no doubt the result of trying to learn from me. Not even the cleverest teacher can mate a good job with a bad tool. You are a very inefficient little girl. You don’t know how to sit on a music stool, or how to hold your hands. Your back is a disgrace, and your fingers are all thumbs. Let’s hear you play something. What have you got here—rubbish? Oh, I see—worse than rubbish—the usual Sonata by that poor Mozart—mercifully he is dead!

“Play it, and as I am not dead, pray do not make it any louder than is strictly necessary. Keep your feet off the pedals. Pupils who don’t know how to play their notes have an idea that they can fall back on the loud pedal to drown their incompetence. That is not the proper use of pedals. They were never put into a piano to reinforce blunders.”

Elsie dropped the Sonata on the floor, and in picking it up overturned the music stool.

Miss Strickland longed to slap her. Like all highly strung musical organisations, she loathed a sudden noise.

“Clumsy little animal!” she said under her breath.

Elsie heard her and turned a dull crimson. She arranged the Sonata with trembling fingers and started off solemnly upon its well-known track.

Every note she played was a mistake. She altered pace, she ignored rhythm. She tried for expression when the notes escaped her. She wallowed desperately on through the thickening disapproval of Miss Strickland’s portentous silence.

Miss Strickland considered that she was giving Elsie a chance.

Elsie knew exactly what the Sonata sounded like to Miss Strickland—she had the vision of the disciple into the mind of the master.

She knew she was inflicting torture upon her ideal human being—but still she inflicted it, having grasped that obedience is better than sacrifice, even the sacrifice of the feelings of the one you are bound to obey.

Blandina before the maddened cow in the Coliseum could not have shown a more desperate courage.

At the end Miss Strickland said with deceptive calm, “You cannot like music, it is impossible! What on earth persuaded you to suggest that I should teach you?”

For a long while Elsie said nothing; she seemed engrossed in folding up the Sonata. Then she lifted her rather weak eyes to Miss Strickland’s face; she had no colour at all, her very lips were white—“Because I liked you—” she stammered. “I wanted you to speak to me—even if you were angry——”

Miss Strickland was not an expert in Biblical language—but there was a quotation which attacked her mind at that moment, and which stuck in her memory for years afterwards: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

She was the first to look away.

If there was one thing Miss Strickland had always set her face against, it was school-girl devotions. If she had any reason for supposing that any particular girl was guilty of such a sentiment towards herself, she crushed it ruthlessly within the hour of its conception.

But there was something in Elsie’s eyes which was different from anything she had seen in the eyes of other girls.

It would not be an easy act for a strong swimmer to deprive a drowning man of his straw. As far as life was concerned Miss Strickland was a strong swimmer, and Elsie was a drowning man, her hopeless, helpless eyes said it.

She had this one desire, this one strange, pitiful claim upon the Universe, and having made it, she was prepared to drown. She said no more.

She did not cry, she sat and trembled on her music stool, looking dumbly at Miss Strickland’s face.

Miss Strickland hesitated. She had always worked on principle before—girls below a certain standard were Miss Saunders’ pupils, girls above it were hers. It is not easy to break a principle at one’s own expense.

Then she said with conscious dryness, “Well—we must see what we can do with you.” She had not taken away the straw. The small figure beside her gave a long sigh of relief.

“You quite understand,” continued Miss Strickland with her usual firmness, “that I make no promises. If you work very hard and improve, I will try to keep you, but it will require all the work you have in you. Now I am going to tell you, not all the things that were wrong in your playing—that would be impossible in the short time that is left to us—but I shall point out a few of them which I shall expect you to overcome before the next lesson.

“As you play the Sonata all wrong, I should suggest your never touching it again and starting to learn properly something you have never seen before. Are you listening to me attentively?”

Elsie nodded, she tried to listen attentively, but she was hearing instead of Miss Strickland’s words the music of the spheres. The sons of God were shouting together in a newly created world.

Her heart’s desire had been granted to Elsie. She was not going to be abandoned by the one being on earth whom she truly loved.

It is unfortunate to have to confess at this point that both Elsie’s parents were living.

Her father was a genial tradesman of the higher class of tradesmen; he did not serve in his own shop, and liked to romp with his children when he came home from business.

Mrs. Andrews was a flighty, pretentious little woman, who had overlaid the maternal instinct by a desire to get on in the world. She would have liked a pretty little girl to show off to her neighbours, but she preferred boys.

She had two of them, and she had brought them up to tease and tyrannise over their small sister. They did this without imagination or cruelty of intention, until they were old enough for school, when they ignored her.

There were little things she could do for them in the holidays, and if she did them all right she could live in peace.

It was a great relief to Elsie Andrews when nobody at home paid any attention to her, but it could not quite fill the whole horizon of youth. Miss Strickland filled the rest of it. Elsie believed in her as the wisest, most beautiful, and grandest of earthly beings. She sometimes wondered if Queen Victoria had ever been like her. Not in some ways; for Elsie hugged it to her heart as a golden but guilty secret that her goddess was “advanced.” Elsie would not have revealed it under torture, but she had seen Miss Strickland smoke a cigarette behind the shrubbery in the school garden. Probably Queen Victoria had never done this; she had lacked that final Napoleonic touch of audacity.

Miss Strickland’s cigarette was the nearest thing to an adventure that Elsie had ever known.

It took the place in her imagination of “perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” She never passed a tobacco shop without a thrill of memory, and she saw, far down the vista of the years, a kindred moment for herself. It was with the aspect of Miss Strickland’s light blue eyes and trim, erect figure (the rest of her appearance was not very impressive) that Elsie supposed Venus had arisen from the sea. (The blue serge coat and skirt which invariably accompanied Miss Strickland, no doubt adhered to her later.)

Miss Strickland was as beautiful as Venus, as grand as Queen Victoria, as wise as Minerva. As far as Elsie was concerned, wisdom would die with Miss Strickland. When Onoria said “That’s settled,” Elsie would rather have disputed the last trump.

It had taken two years of dumb and invisible worship before Elsie had dared to make this final bid for the notice of her goddess.

She knew it was final: if Miss Strickland had turned her away, she would have sunk like a stone to the bottom of her despair. She would never have attempted to move again. Life would have gone on all round her, but she would not have lived. She was living now; every breathless moment of her terrible lesson she had lived—ardour and agony combined in her. She felt that she was moving as swiftly as the Scotch express—sparks were flying out from the tension of her silence.

“Well,” said Miss Strickland, “you’ve had over your hour—and I think I’ve told you enough to go on with. You haven’t talent, but don’t let that discourage you, I never believe in little girls with talent; work produces ability up to a certain point. There is no such thing as a woman genius and never will be.”

Elsie looked at her in surprise.

“But you—” she murmured. “Surely you are a genius?”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Strickland, flushing half with annoyance and half with a feeling that was not annoyance.

“I am nothing of the kind. I am merely a very hard-working person with the natural advantages of a good ear and light fingers.”

Elsie could not believe this and she looked as if she could not believe it; but she said nothing.

“Now run along,” said Miss Strickland briskly but not unkindly. You cannot be unkind to a person who will not believe that you are not a genius.

Elsie went out of the music room with her head held up and her eyes sparkling.

Miss Strickland did not immediately ring the bell to summon her next pupil. She felt unaccountably stirred.

“A very ordinary little girl,” she said to herself reassuringly. “A most ordinary little girl. Still I will see if something can’t be done with her. The poor child has been shamefully neglected by some woman no doubt. Women are the most destructive force in existence, or I should rather say weakness. Force is creative and appertains to man. Women are destructive because they have no force; they destroy by the conscious exercise of their weakness.”

Then Miss Strickland rang the bell. She felt more natural after this little fling at her old enemy, and she had succeeded in hiding from herself why she had given way to Elsie, who should most certainly have been returned to Miss Saunders.

CHAPTER III

Even a very dull person may achieve his aim if he has only one aim, and devotes his entire attention to it.

Elsie’s aim in life was to please Miss Strickland. She thought of nothing else by day, and she dreamed of nothing else by night.

All the other teachers, and the objects of their efforts, slipped past her. She saw them vaguely as trees walking, and bumped into them from time to time with some severity. She was considered the dunce of the school.

The cream of her concentration was her work for the piano. She practised as the devotee prays. She did not think any more of the actual process than the devotee thinks of his prayers. It is the Deity which is the object of the devotee, and it was Miss Strickland who stood for Elsie beyond the five-finger exercises and chromatic scales; even as the vision of Beatrice leaned towards Dante out of Paradise.

Miss Strickland was amazed at the child’s progress; she was the more amazed because she had seen from the first with an instinct practically unerring, that she was not dealing with talent. She still believed that it was not talent. It was something that baffled Miss Strickland—an ardour of obedience, a stake-like adherence to her least words, which produced odd blunders, and sudden advances, and finally a higher level of achievement than that of any pupil in the school.

For two years the intercourse between Miss Strickland and Elsie was limited to forty minutes a week in the music room.

Elsie accepted Miss Strickland’s temper as the earth accepts the ministrations of climate. Sun and shower, heat and cold were part, no doubt, of a divine plan, and so were the sharpness and the comparative mildness of Miss Strickland’s nerves.

Of course Elsie liked them to be mild, but when they were sharp they seemed to her like the magnetic lightnings of the Universe.

Miss Strickland had never had a pupil whom she could hurt more. She was often unscrupulous in the use of her power, but the absoluteness of it in Elsie’s case stayed her hand.

Elsie had no defence against her, and she would have used none if she had had it.

One day Miss Strickland announced,

“There is to be a concert at the end of the term, Elsie. You have improved so much lately that I have told Miss Bretherton that you will play at it.”

Elsie squirmed. “Oh, if you please, Miss Strickland, I can’t!” she stammered. “I couldn’t—not before people—I’m too—I’m too afraid!”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Strickland firmly. “I am the best judge of whether you can play or not, and I have decided that you can. It is absurd to be afraid of people who know very little about music and have come prepared to be easily pleased. You are not afraid to play before me, and I don’t come prepared to be pleased, and do know a good deal about music.”

Elsie, if she could have explained, would have said, “That’s what I’m afraid of—not pleasing you. It’s you that will care about the people.”

But it was out of the question to make a statement of this kind to Miss Strickland, even if it had occurred to Elsie that it was the truth, and things seldom occurred to Elsie as the truth until after what she had been afraid of had happened.

She merely repeated in an agony, “Oh, please don’t make me play! I shall break down! I know I shall break down! It would terrify me to disappoint you!”

To which Miss Strickland replied, “Don’t be idiotic. I have decided upon Mendelssohn.”

The school at Little Ticklington gave particularly good concerts.

Besides the parents, the Mayor sometimes appeared with several Town Councillors, the Vicar, who was an Archdeacon, and various people in the neighbourhood who thought Education ought to be encouraged and that their presence at School Concerts encouraged it.

Miss Strickland sat at the back of the hall, so that she could hear if the songs carried.

She had prepared all the girls carefully, and Miss Saunders, who lived in the School, would supervise them on the platform.

Miss Strickland had not seen Elsie for three days. At her last lesson she had played the Mendelssohn uncommonly well, but she had annoyed Miss Strickland by opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. Miss Strickland had told her so, and Elsie had then shut her mouth and kept it shut, but Miss Strickland had still been annoyed. She was conscious of something in the child that was not consenting to her will, and this was very unusual.

Children must play at Concerts. Elsie was now fourteen, she was a great big girl, and the Mendelssohn was very easy.

Miss Strickland told herself these reassuring facts several times before the curtain swung vacillatingly back for the first girl to perform. “Besides,” Miss Strickland hastily informed herself, “I take no special interest in Elsie.”

The first girl performed as first girls generally do. She was chosen for her hardihood and she had a little over-estimated it. Still she banged pleasantly away, and while she was too nervous to remember any of the finer shades of Miss Strickland’s careful teaching, she played no wrong notes, and covered up the weakness of her execution with that merciful solvent of pianoforte puzzles, the loud pedal.

Miss Strickland mentally provided for this young criminal a castigation of the direst kind, short of direct profanity. Only men (who deserve it) may have the relief of an entire language to devote to wrath. Miss Strickland had to rely upon the fervency of her emotion. Then she listened, with the grim patience of a teacher who is not involved in the subject, to a bad recitation.

After this there were several excellent and charming songs with choruses. Miss Strickland had taught them to the school, and in one case written the song herself.

They went with a vim, and gave her a certain amount of very slight pleasure. And then Elsie appeared.

She was dressed in a heavy white muslin dress which revealed her thick ankles and pitilessly broad-toed shoes.

It was the wrong kind of muslin, trimmed with tawdry embroidery and girt about the untamed breadth of her waist by a harsh blue sash. Her hair lay lankly down her back, evading where it could the ministrations of a similarly harsh blue ribbon.

Elsie moved heavily and stared at the audience with the eyes of a sleep walker.

Miss Strickland had particularly told Elsie to keep her mouth shut, her head up and her chin in. The results of these attempts upon the figure are usually beneficial to young performers, but nothing could do much for Elsie’s figure; it remained thick and uncertain, with a tendency to bulge in the wrong places.

Miss Strickland felt an unusual pang of depression when she saw Elsie, followed by a much more usual one of rage.

Why had not Elsie’s mother chosen more suitable clothes for her? “Women again! They only think of clothes, and they show the value of their thought by a stupid result like this!” thought Miss Strickland sternly.

Elsie sat down clumsily on the music stool. It was lower than she had expected it to be. Miss Saunders, the young music teacher, adjusted the Mendelssohn.

It was “The Venetian Boat Song,” the easiest and lightest of concert pieces.

Elsie played the first two bars quite faultlessly. Miss Strickland was about to breathe a sigh of relief, when, to her horror, the girl stopped abruptly and took her hands off the piano. Then she played the first two bars over again, and stopped once more.

There was a long silence in the hall, a breathless, inconvenient silence, and then Elsie turned slowly on her music stool away from the piano and faced the audience. She looked like some one delivering themselves into the hands of Red Indians for torture. She faced them with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed, not so much appealingly as hopelessly, upon the audience.

She did not cry; it was the expression of an immovable despair. She neither stirred nor spoke, she only looked straight in front of her as if she saw the end of Hope.

Miss Strickland felt as if the child’s gaze fixed itself upon her heart. Before she had time to move, Miss Saunders had stepped forward at a sign from Miss Bretherton, and led Elsie away.

It was obviously impossible for any one who looked like that to play “The Venetian Boat Song.”

Miss Saunders (who wanted Elsie to enjoy the tea afterwards) led her to the back row of little girls.

Elsie went with her passively and sank into her seat like a thing frozen.

Miss Strickland had once watched a baby rabbit holding itself together to look like a leaf—its fear had fixed it into the landscape.

Elsie looked like that. She did not move for half an hour; she was as anxious as the baby rabbit to escape all observation.

A group of charmingly dressed girls came on to the stage and danced. There were no more hitches. Everything else was beautifully done; and when it was over Elsie asked if she might go and rest. She said she had a headache.

Miss Saunders, who was sympathetic and didn’t know what else to say—agreed readily. The other girls stared at Elsie, but no one was cruel enough, or kind enough, to say anything to her. They all felt that she was interesting to talk about, but uncomfortable to talk to, and they left her alone.

Miss Strickland decided to do the same. She took her tea on the lawn and ate some particularly good strawberries without enjoying them.

Then she went to look for Elsie. There were very few places where Elsie had any right to be. She wasn’t in the empty school room, or in the small ante-room used by the teachers before they went into their classes. She was in the dressing room behind a curtain, lying on the boots and shoes.

It was only by the faintest of creaks that her presence was disclosed to Miss Strickland. She lay there in a crumpled heap of muslin and anguish, sobbing as if her heart would break.

It was very pitiful to see her. Miss Strickland knelt down by Elsie’s side and tried to speak, but to her surprise she found it difficult. She said “My dear child,” twice over, the first time her voice actually shook. Then she recovered herself.

“Stop grovelling among those boots!” she exclaimed sharply. This was better. Elsie sat up, and made an enormous effort to control herself, but the sobs had got possession of her: they shook her down among the boots again.

Miss Strickland frowned. “It’s all my fault,” she found herself saying. “I ought not to have made you play, and you really mustn’t be so distressed about it. People often make mistakes. One can retrieve them. I daresay,” said Miss Strickland mercifully, but without accuracy, “I daresay I’ve broken down myself before now, but I shouldn’t give way about it. I know that it was not carelessness on your part. On the contrary, you were trying too hard!”

“Oh!” gasped Elsie, “don’t you hate me? You must—I know you must! You see I can’t—I’m no good. I never was any good! And I never will be! I’m like that!”

Miss Strickland was shocked. She disliked over-confidence (over-confident people always do) but this child’s formidable hopelessness was worse than any over-confidence. She was behaving as if there were a flaw in the Universe; and in Miss Strickland’s Universe there had never been a flaw. She had disliked many occurrences but she had felt equal to them, whether she disliked them or not. She did not feel equal to what was happening now. She said, “My dear, you mustn’t be silly. If you weren’t some good you wouldn’t be here!”

Elsie replied, “But I know I’m not, and I don’t want to be here, I’d rather be dead.”

“That’s sillier still,” Miss Strickland answered doubtfully, “and it’s also very wrong.”

“What does it matter if it’s wrong or not—if you hate me—” sobbed Elsie. “Nothing matters to me except that!”

Miss Strickland stared at her uncomfortably. She still did not know what action was the most sensible to take.

An instinct told her what to do, but she was not used to instincts, and felt flurried by having one. Her instinct told her to take the child in her arms.

She compromised with it, and kissed Elsie, a little reluctantly, on the cheek.

“I don’t hate you at all, child,” she said kindly. “You’re a very good, painstaking little girl, and I am very fond of you.”

Then Miss Strickland arrived at the nearest she was ever likely to get to a miracle.

She saw a plain little girl, made plainer by a convulsive fit of crying, turn perfectly beautiful. It was like watching a black and windswept country yielding to the sun. Across Elsie’s face light spread: the light of an infinite gratitude, a preposterous faith, an overwhelming love.

Her eyes met Miss Strickland’s and held hers almost against her will.

“Then,” the child said slowly, “I’m glad I broke down.”

It was the truth, and Miss Strickland with her love of truth should have recognised it; but she had already recognised a great deal more than it was at all comfortable to recognise. She really couldn’t go on recognising things which were so far from sensible, whether they were true or not.

“Well, don’t let us have any more nonsense,” she said briskly. “Wipe your eyes, and brush, as far as you can, the dust off your frock. You really should not have lain down on boots and shoes, it was most unsuitable. You’d better come and see Miss Bretherton; she has been asking about you on the lawn, and she’s no more angry with you than I am.”

“Please may I go home?” Elsie pleaded. “I’m quite happy now, only I don’t want to see any one else. You see nobody else matters.”

Miss Strickland hesitated. Head mistresses always matter. Still she had pressed the point about Elsie’s playing and it had proved a mistake. Onoria made a point of learning from her mistakes, when she saw them. Perhaps it was better to waive the point. The child looked dreadful, she could make excuses for her to Miss Bretherton, and excuses are tidier and more malleable than tear-stained little girls.

“Very well,” Miss Strickland said at last, “you may go home if you want to—” But there was something in Elsie’s eyes which still held hers.

“If I might,” whispered Elsie bravely, “play you ‘The Venetian Boat Song’—before I go?”

Miss Strickland nodded. She led the way into a small practice room, out of reach of the festivities on the lawn. Then she sat down on a hard cane chair and listened to “The Venetian Boat Song” for perhaps the 500th time.

It did not sound at all familiar to her.

Elsie played it as Miss Strickland had never heard it played before. For the only time in her life music was captured by Elsie’s faithful, clumsy, little fingers. She played it dreamily, tenderly, with ardour and with grace, as Mendelssohn himself might have played it—who had the heart of a child.

There was a little silence after the last notes sounded.

“That,” Elsie explained as she turned round slowly on her music stool, “was the way I had meant to play it.”

CHAPTER IV

Onoria Strickland had an imagination that centralised its own experiences.

She believed that for pure drama Little Ticklington outshone Paris. Its crimes were more lurid, its adventures more romantic, its types of character more truly representative of human nature. Her own career often seemed to Onoria Napoleonic, and her friends and her enemies were always larger than life.

At first she undertook Elsie Andrews as a conscientious educator undertakes bad material, but as the years passed and Elsie’s affection stood solidly across Onoria’s pathway as immovable as granite, she began to find in Elsie strange and exotic virtues.

“That girl,” she would announce, “has the mind of the Fourteenth Century—mature and adventurous!

“She will do something one day. She is not like modern girls; she has character. Not that silly thing they call temperament, thank goodness!—temperament wobbles and stings like a jellyfish, and arrives nowhere—but good solid English character! Elsie won’t set the Thames on fire perhaps, but she hasn’t set out with any such theory. Mercifully she knows her limitations as a woman. What she has set out to do she will accomplish in spite of all obstacles—I call that dignified.”

Elsie knew just what Onoria thought of her, because Onoria always told her friends exactly what she thought of them, even when it was nice.

(After her twenty-first birthday Miss Strickland became “Onoria” to Elsie.)

It was difficult for Elsie to believe that she was dignified, but she knew that she had a kind of strength.

She found in herself a fund of resistance enabling her to guard her friendship with Onoria. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Andrews liked it; Mrs. Andrews because, like many mothers, it seemed to her unnecessary that her children should form any ties outside their home; Mr. Andrews because he foresaw that this concentration of his daughter’s heart might damage her future prospects.

“If she gets into tagging round for ever after an old maid,” he explained to his wife, “she won’t marry. Why don’t you smarten her up a bit and take her out with you?”

But Elsie wouldn’t be smartened up. She did not refuse new clothes, but she did not respond to them; and you cannot make a dead weight look chic. Mrs. Andrews tried. She would have liked a daughter she could take with her to tea parties, not one who practised Beethoven and read Shakespeare.

Elsie loathed tea parties. She followed her mother on those rare occasions when she had failed to elude her as one who follows a corpse to the grave. People soon stopped asking Mrs. Andrews to bring her daughter.

Then Mr. Andrews bought Elsie a tennis racket to play with the young people.

She went out after the house was locked up at night and broke it against an oak tree in the garden. It was this act that convinced Onoria that Elsie had in her the spirit of the Fourteenth Century.

If there was one thing Elsie disliked more than tea parties with her mother’s friends, it was tennis with young people.

She could not play tennis and she disliked young people. They believed all the things Onoria said were not so—and they carried on conversations that were not solely for the sake of conversation. They seemed to wish to attract each other.

Elsie knew that the fault lay in the women and she would have talked to the young men if they had looked at her, but they did not seem to see that she was there; and you cannot carry on a conversation with young men who do not look at you—however great your respect may be for the masculine sex.

Onoria explained Elsie’s position to her kindly but firmly.

“You are not a man’s woman,” she said to her, “and you had better make up your mind to it once and for all. I know men. They are hoodwinked and misled by appearances, owing no doubt to the false upbringing they receive from their mothers, but there it is—they rarely understand true merit until they have provided themselves with the contrary. You are not a marrying woman. Realise this and don’t hanker. There are many other things in life.”

Elsie sighed and said she supposed there were. She did not sigh very heavily because she was still quite young and there was Onoria. Besides, the only husband she knew anything about was Mr. Andrews. He was by no means a bad husband as husbands go, he sometimes called his wife “Pussy,” and if no one did what he disliked, he was seldom cross; but he was not as interesting to Elsie as Onoria.

What Elsie liked best in the world was sitting in Onoria’s garden, and being told what to think.

Onoria was a well-informed woman with violent prejudices, and all her information was at the disposal of her prejudices.

Her opinions were pitched battles, and her views (she intensely disliked what she called ‘viewy’ people, but she had her own views) were like the approaches of a distant thunderstorm. It might pass over if nothing happened to bring it down.

To enjoy Onoria’s conversation was to confess to a taste for Punch and Judy Shows; and, as time hardened Onoria’s method of attack, Little Ticklington grew tired of her bludgeoning.

The men who had delighted in Onoria’s prowess had married, and with years of domesticity their delight in prowess had gradually faded out, or been transferred to the actions of their offspring.

Onoria disliked other people’s children and very wisely told them so. It relieved her of many tiresome obligations, but among them it relieved her of the presence of the parents. She had had to throw away the apple with the core.

Onoria had fewer and fewer objects for her affection. Prendergast had changed from being an elderly and morose Pug, into being very old and resentful of all claims upon his attention except in the shape of well chopped-up food. He liked the results of tenderness without its expression.

Peter Gubbins was just as faithful, but if you have been faddy and aggravating as a young man, you will infallibly become eccentric and exasperating when youth has left you.

Peter Gubbins was unaware that youth had left him; he sometimes had misgivings about Time and Onoria’s figure. Her complexion had always been a little hard and weather beaten, but her hair retained its colour and her voice its piercing quality; besides Onoria was three years older than Peter.

He knew Onoria was no longer young, but she was still very, very powerful.

Neither of them had had a severe illness, a great sorrow, or an unexpected good fortune; and it is very easy to believe that you have remained the same if everything else has.

Peter wrote less poetry and rather more articles, and he grew the finest sweet peas in the neighbourhood.

There was one event which might have awakened Peter to the lapse of years if it had not come on almost as gradually as his success with the sweet peas. This was the introduction of Elsie; but she had been introduced before he could connect change with her, or receive the challenge to his personality which a young girl’s friendship will cause the least self-conscious of men.

Elsie had not made friends with Peter at first, but after two or three years of speechless, tepid watchfulness upon both sides, a bond had been secretly and invisibly formed between them.

They could not have told why it was secret and they hardly knew that it was a bond; they only knew that in each other’s society there was an absence of insistent racket, a blissful sense of not being at their best and liveliest, and not needing to be, which took the place of active pleasure.

There were very few of these harmonious moments. Usually Onoria was there, and they met under her eyes and with the volleyings of her wit, and the tremendous onslaught of her theories, thick upon them.

But there had been June evenings when Onoria had letters to write, or was playing over new sets of pieces with a view to her profession, when Elsie slipped out of the long French window on to the lawn to water the flowers, and found that Peter was watering his.

Peter joined her on these occasions and they hunted for slugs together with an effortless ardour rarely obtained upon their separate quests.

Sometimes they combined with desperate loyalty to try to save Onoria an exertion that they could not persuade her to give up, or planned to appease her with a suitable birthday present.

Their talk was full of Onoria. They quoted her most strident sayings with bursts of nervous laughter; they bulwarked their own opinions with the justice of her utterances; and sometimes with bated breath they confessed to each other the little difficulties which arose on their domestic hearths, when these hearths were confronted with Onoria.

Mr. Gubbins had a housekeeper who hated Onoria and was herself a redoubtable woman. Elsie’s family sometimes stood up and raged against her intimacy with Onoria; they even curtailed it to music lesson days and Sundays. They couldn’t quite destroy it because the most authoritative of families would shrink from forbidding one of its daughters from visiting a very respectable, middle-aged lady, who had been her music teacher since she was a child.

“I said,” Elsie explained breathlessly behind the rhododendron bushes, “if you stop me going to see Miss Strickland, I’ll tell the Vicar and Miss Bretherton. You know Father thinks the world of the Vicar since we’ve stopped going to Chapel; he’s Onoria’s second cousin too; and no one would like to have Miss Bretherton down on them, not even Mother—so they just glared. Glaring’s awful, of course, still it can’t do you any real harm.”

“No,” Mr. Gubbins murmured with a long sigh of regret. “It’s not as if your parents cooked for you! If Mrs. Binns has been crossed, and whenever she sees Onoria she seems to get crossed, she pours pepper into everything I eat! And as I’ve often told you, I have a very delicate throat!”

Elsie looked uneasily over the tobacco plant they were spraying.

Onoria had laughed so hard and so long upon the subject of Mr. Gubbins’ throat that it seemed to Elsie a disloyalty to let him talk about it.

What he was afraid of was cancer. He had an enlarged tonsil.

Mr. Gubbins could (as Onoria pointed out to him several times during the course of the winter when he was always catching colds) have it taken out. But Mr. Gubbins did not think it was bad enough for this heroic remedy; it was only bad enough to give rise occasionally to the question of whether the doctor really knew what he was talking about in assigning to a pain so severe a cause so insufficiently lurid.

“What I say is,” explained Mr. Gubbins to Elsie (he never gave this explanation to Onoria), “if he does happen to be wrong and the trouble is, as I sometimes think, malignant, I shall have to pay in the end; he’ll get out of it all right. Doctors always do.”

“Hadn’t you perhaps better consult another doctor?” asked Elsie timidly. She was always timid even with Mr. Gubbins, and even when she saw, as she frequently did, the plainest way out of his troubles; and Mr. Gubbins thought that timidity and sense were a delightful combination in a woman.

“It’s not much use my doing that,” said Mr. Gubbins moodily. “They all stand in together you know. Medical etiquette, as they call it, is neither more nor less than a conspiracy against the public.

“Besides, when you come to think of it, I’ve been to Jenkins on and off for thirty years, and I shouldn’t like to hurt his feelings, especially as it may not be cancer after all.”

“What are you two talking about, over there in the shrubbery?” shouted Onoria from the window.

Mr. Gubbins looked appealingly at Elsie.

They both trembled, but Mr. Gubbins trembled most.

“Slugs,” said Elsie in a wavering voice.

Her eyes fell before the accusatory ones of Mr. Gubbins. He was thinking how true, how painfully true, Onoria’s theory was, as to the prevarication of women.

Whatever the consequences might have been, he could not have told a lie to Onoria. He would not have dared.

CHAPTER V

Jealousy is one of the faults which it is hardest for human beings to confess.

It is the least successful of the vices, for by its nature it implies that you find yourself less attractive than somebody else, and you are conscious that in the exercise of it, you become less attractive still. Fortunately righteous indignation often looks very like it.

Miss Onoria Strickland never dreamed that she suffered from jealousy. She considered it a slave vice confined to women and exceptionally feeble men.

She knew that her sisters-in-law were monsters of human iniquity; she realised that the other school teachers belonged to a bygone age and were unfortunate products even of that debased period. She saw that modernity and youth had lost alike their innocence and their ardour, at about the time when she herself had ceased to be young; and she despised women: but she did not realise that there was a connecting link between these criticisms, and that her own self-love was the connecting link.

She was taken completely by surprise when Peter Gubbins and Elsie Andrews conspired behind her back to make a fool of her.

This was her instant definition of their timid attempts to form a separate relation. Onoria might not have been so astonished if she had been a quicker hand at reading the silences of others. But like most great talkers, she was apt to take for granted, unless directly contradicted, that some form of agreement had taken place. She did not realise that the silence which gives consent is only one out of many others far less accommodating.

Neither Elsie nor Peter had ever openly disagreed with Onoria, but their souls had rebelled in a wordless determination—rather like that which precedes the back kick of a mule.

They could not, for instance, see the harm of Peter Gubbins singing, to Elsie’s accompaniment, old Scotch ballads. Peter Gubbins had a great fancy for Scotch ballads, no knowledge of the dialect, and a tenor voice liable to those spasmodic interludes which sometimes take place upon a gramophone.

Onoria had, not without justice, decided that he ought not to sing in public. She had put it to him perfectly plainly. “You only make a painful noise,” she had asserted, “disagreeable to listen to and bad for your weak throat, and you live in a semi-detached villa. The sooner you break yourself of a bad habit like this, the better!”

Peter had broken himself of the habit, but he still indulged in occasional orgies which took place while Onoria was at school.

He could only pick out the air with one finger on the piano by himself; and to his great delight Elsie agreed to accompany him.

She arranged to come early to Onoria’s before school hours were over and meet Peter in Onoria’s music room.

When Onoria became due, Peter hurried out of the window into the garden, and crossed by the wall into his own domain. On Onoria’s arrival, she found Elsie, punctual and passive, waiting for her usual rites upon the piano.

Ostriches would have known better than Peter and Elsie. They do not, when they plunge their heads in the sand to escape an enemy (even while exposing the rest of their person to view), sing Scotch dialect songs with voices like a damaged kettle.

Peter’s voice carried, and on one still day it reached Onoria coming up the road. She had a faultless ear and she knew it was Peter’s voice, and that it came, not out of his window, which would have been a misdemeanour, but out of her own, which was a crime; and she knew that Peter could not play his own accompaniments.

She hastened to the gate, but by the time she had reached it Peter had already vanished—he did not know what he was leaving his accomplice to face, but there is no reasonable doubt that if he had known he would still have left her.

Onoria rushed into the music room, breathless and terrific.

“What,” she cried with piercing incisiveness, “are you doing here?”

Elsie was in the act of lifting her muff to her face—it was not much of a protection, but she had seized upon it when she heard the front door bang. She felt that it was the bang of a discovered crime. It took Elsie a long time to say “Nothing—” but at last she said it; and then she looked all round the room for a way of escape, but there was none.

It would be difficult to say which of the two criminals Onoria was angriest with. She had been angry with Peter Gubbins all her life—for being Peter Gubbins; his character irritated and at times eluded Onoria. Elsie she loved; probably she was angriest with Elsie.

“Please don’t tell me lies,” she exclaimed with deadly patience. “I heard perfectly well what you were doing, as I came up the road. I could no more mistake Peter’s voice than a donkey braying. It came from my room—and you—you, Elsie, were playing his accompaniments!”

Elsie bit a piece of fur out of her muff in anguish.

The situation was too large for her. She cowered under it, speechless and overwhelmed. But something at the bottom of her heart told her it was not fair and she would not be overwhelmed.

“What do you mean by such atrocious behaviour?” went on Onoria with fluent passion. “Using my house, behind my back, to do what you know I have forbidden? How dared you do such a thing, Elsie? How can you come here now and look me in the face with that treacherous secret upon you?”

Elsie made a gesture of despair: she put the muff down; it had protected her from nothing.

It was a late autumn evening, a river fog had crept into the room, everything was a little indistinct, like a scene in a nightmare; only the bitter, sharp voice of Onoria pelting at her was as distinct as a succession of stones flung against a wall.

“Oh,” she gasped, “I didn’t mean—we didn’t think!”

“Mean! think!” cried Onoria. “What have you ever thought or meant, either of you? How can I tell now? How can I believe you? Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve undermined my confidence! How many times have you played here without my knowledge? I don’t believe this is the first!”

“He did like singing the Scotch ballads so,” Elsie murmured defensively. “It was an accident the first time. We just tried them over: it didn’t seem any harm. He had come in to dust your books for you and I was early, so we just tried them over.”

Onoria changed her ground. She felt for a moment as if it was not so firm as she had expected.

The crime did not stand out well against the background of Peter’s services.

“Of course,” she said more mildly, “you mustn’t think I mind for myself.” (What jealous person has ever minded for themselves? It is the lowering of the beloved object which afflicts them most—and the beloved object is always lowered by a shared dominion.) “People do not as a rule care to have their houses used for other people’s meetings, without their consent, but I overlook all that. Has it never occurred to you what a scandal such performances produce? No doubt you are being talked about all over Ticklington at this moment. If your parents knew of it they would very rightly prevent your coming here again. And since it is my house I am in a sense responsible for you. I have never been placed in such an invidious position in my life—and by you, Elsie!”

Elsie was in tears now. She picked up the muff again, and wept bitterly into it. She was not an easy crier and the fur choked her.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” she sobbed. “We only played ‘Over the Sea to Skye.’ I don’t see why people should talk about it.”

“You were alone here with Peter in my absence,” said Onoria coldly. “That is what they will talk about.”

It was very unfair of Onoria to say this because she was constantly alone with Peter herself, and nobody in Little Ticklington had ever talked about it. Nobody in Little Ticklington thought any more about being alone with Peter than they would have thought of being alone with Prendergast.

“I am speaking for your own good,” added Onoria, more gently and even less truthfully, for like most people who think they are speaking for the good of others, she was merely speaking to relieve her own spiteful feelings.

The sight of Elsie’s tears softened her a little, but she mistook their meaning. They were not tears of penitence, as Onoria believed—they were the tears of an outraged sense of justice.

“I don’t see what particular good you think this is going to do me!” Elsie observed between her sobs. Onoria opened her mouth to reply and then shut it again. It took time to produce any tangible advantage to Elsie out of the vortex of her own bad temper—finally, however, she did produce it.

“I hope it will check you!” she said with dignity. “Before you do something more compromising still.

“My advice to you is not to see Peter Gubbins again. I will deal with him later, and let him know what I think of him for taking advantage of a young and I hope innocent girl!”

“I don’t see where the advantage comes,” persisted Elsie, who had unaccountably stopped crying, “if he isn’t to sing his songs any more.”

“Don’t be puerile!” said Onoria sharply. “You know perfectly well what I mean. None of your green girl prevarications with me!”

“No I don’t,” replied Elsie with astounding obstinacy.

“You’ve often told me, it was always women who took advantage of men, and dragged them into things, and then complained about them afterwards. Well, if it is—Peter couldn’t have dragged me into anything, could he? And I’m not complaining!”

Nobody likes to be convicted out of his own mouth, and Onoria liked it less than most people.

“Please don’t make such an absurd exhibition of yourself,” she said, with heightened colour and reduced softness. “I have told you what I think, and how I intend to act. I am always perfectly direct and straightforward. It is a pity that you cannot be the same. We will discuss this question no further! Do you wish to take your music lesson or do you not?”

Of course Elsie did not wish to take her music lesson, but habit is very powerful, and the habit of surrender to a stronger will is probably more difficult to break than any other habit. She gasped, put her muff down and took her lesson, as if it were a dose of medicine.

She even kissed Onoria good-bye when she left—but if Onoria had been an adept in kisses (which she was not) she would have felt something wrong about it.

The complete kiss lingers—Elsie’s was without warmth and swift.

It was not accompanied by any form of apology, but Onoria felt that she had the whip hand of the situation, and that those who hold the whip do not need to exact apologies. She patted Elsie on the back and told her to be a sensible girl. Elsie made a non-committal sound in her throat and vanished hurriedly into the fog.

The fog was very dense, and she may or she may not have met Peter Gubbins at the post box.

The scene between Peter and Onoria was far less drastic.

Onoria had quieted down before she saw him and she spoke as man to man. She pointed out to Peter that he had taken an unwarrantable liberty with her premises, and that he had acted in a compromising way with a girl very nearly thirty years younger than himself.

Peter did not tell her, as the more virile type of man whom Onoria admired might have told her, that she was a bad-minded old hen and was talking a pack of nonsense; he took what she said with extreme seriousness.

Peter quite saw her point about her premises and apologised.