The Retrospect Part 3

But it was not to be. Although I had nothing to be ashamed of in connection with him--very much to the contrary--I did not mention his name to anybody, also I need not say that I kept to myself the little affair that had been between us; I merely held an ear c.o.c.ked for casual information. And it ended with my leaving D---- without having any news of him, not knowing even whether he was alive or dead.

But later I dropped across one of his sisters, a widow, who had become connected by marriage with my husband's family. One day we went in a little party to the town where she lived and she entertained us to tea.

I sat beside her at table, and inevitably we gossiped of our young days throughout the meal. She told me what had become of her several brothers and sisters, and so as last I heard of the one in whom I was interested.

"I have just had a letter from him," said she, no trace in her face or voice of any knowledge of the ancient secret. "I told him that you were in England, and he wishes me to give you his kindest remembrances and to say he is very sorry not to be able to see you." I forget where she said he lived, but it was in some far-away county; married, of course, with grown-up children--no doubt grandchildren--as I have.

CHAPTER IV

THE HOME OF CHILDHOOD

There was another old home--an earlier one--that on my first walk in D---- I went to look at. Its a.s.sociations were even more keenly dear, and archaeologically it was immensely the most interesting.

I was astonished to see how very, very old it was, and for the first time was curious about its evidently extensive history. There was a monastic suggestion in its thick walls and crow-stepped gables, and the oaken door exactly like a church door, and the peculiar irregularity of the grouping of its parts. Nothing was changed, except that a horrid little office had been built into a corner that was once a sunless well between masonry, containing only evergreen shrubs and a dense mat of lilies-of-the-valley; but the office was an excrescence so glaringly alone by itself that one could treat it as if it were a tradesman's cart awaiting orders. Nothing else seemed to have been altered; even the bay-tree, from which we gathered leaves to flavour cookings, stood in the little front court as of yore, and the old ivy was, I am sure, the old ivy of fifty, possibly a hundred, if not a thousand, years ago. I viewed the place now with instructed eyes, which told me that half-a-century was a mere fraction of its age.

The guide-book says nothing about it. Old dwelling-houses are too thick on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous persons and events; this was no more to the town of D---- in 1908 than it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the station. At neither time was there a doubt of the latter's incomparable superiority.

But I had come from the land of the raw and new, the domain of the social vagrant and the speculative builder, and I could appreciate the charm of this relic of antiquity, for the first time. I stood at the gate, and tried to think how it had come there. The clue was in the name of the lane beside it--Priory Road--and in the guide-book statement that the fine old rectory, in the gardens of which we used to lose arrows and b.a.l.l.s over the wall dividing it from ours, stood "on the site of a Benedictine Priory."

Then I tried to reconstruct the plan of the interior, and remembered that the floor under the cocoanut matting of the dining-room was of cold stone slabs; the pa.s.sages the same, and I think there was a press of black wood, that became store cupboards, built into an end of that room.

Entering the arched front door, of such p.r.o.nounced ecclesiastical design, mother's store-room was the first thing you came to, a room that opened out of the front hall on your right hand. Pa.s.sing through that hall and opening the door that faced you, you were dropped straight into the drawing-room down a short flight of steps. One window of that apartment looked out towards the road (I fancy the excrescent office blocked it); another, and a door, opened directly upon the garden, gravelled nearly all over, with, at one side, a group of large and very old yew-trees, roofing a circular wooden bench. In the right-hand drawing-room wall a third door opened, at the top of another flight of steps, into what we called the music-room--really a cosier sitting-room, incidentally enclosing the piano, and without so many draughts in it; and a fourth door in a fourth wall led you into the stone-flagged pa.s.sage connecting with our refectory and the domestic offices, and to the foot of the staircase. Surely that plan was never drawn with a view to the convenience of a lay family!

Upstairs the arrangement was still more unconventional, although it may have been conventual, for aught I know. That window over the arched main entrance--it was open, and its muslin curtains fluttering in the breeze--belonged to one of three rooms so tucked into the many-cornered structure that they described a sort of triangle; one was hemmed in by two, the only way in and out being through one or other of those two, which also intercommunicated, the point of common junction being a sort of square entry place, having the three doors in its panelled sides. For some reason the inmost, which was also to the person in the road the outermost, room was reserved as a guest chamber--the aunts used it; but once it was given to a male visitor, who wanted to be out early. His dilemma was a cruel one, seeing that his window was in a sheer wall and he had no rope ladder. He could gain freedom only through my parents'

room or through that occupied by their daughters, now grown from babies to little girls. After long listening in our joint vestibule, he chose the former path, as the least of two evils; but, although he crept on stockinged feet, my mother was awake. She made some alterations after that. It seems to me they should have been made before.

Over that window above the front door another and smaller window looked down on me. I met its gaze with a shrinking eye and the cold creeps down my back--yes, even after all those years and years! You reached the little sloping walled room behind it through a suite of attics at the top of dark and lonely stairs; the first room was the servants', who, however, were not there when I went to bed; the next had only ghosts in it, and the locked door of a lumber-room out of which I nightly expected some shape of horror to spring forth on me as I breathlessly scurried past; the last--with this window in it--was where I slept with my governess.

Seven governesses in succession reigned over us, for in my circle it was considered rather shocking to send girls to boarding-school, which was quite the proper place for boys; and I can truthfully affirm that I never learned anything which would now be considered worth learning until I had done with them all and started foraging for myself. I did have a few months of boarding-school at the end--obtained by hard teasing for it--and a very good school for its day it was, but it left no lasting impression on my mind, except that of great unhappiness. The unhappiness had nothing to do with its being a boarding-school, but solely to its not being Home. Home is a place that I never do get away from without immediately wis.h.i.+ng myself back in it.

Of the first two governesses--technically the nursery governesses--I remember little but their names and the circ.u.mstance that one of them was a n.o.bleman's grand-daughter. Her mother had eloped with a poor tutor, and been cast out of her world in consequence--so closely does one generation resemble another in some of its practices, if not in all.

The next--I think the next--was she who once turned that gable room into a torture-chamber, worthy successor of heretic-persecuting Mediaeval monks, if any such preceded her. Only I was not a heretic, but an innocent, fairly well-behaved, carefully cherished child.

She came from L----, a neighbouring town of county importance, and it was darkly hinted that her father kept a boot-shop there. Anyway, she gave herself great airs. Before coming to us she had been governess at S---- Hall, and her late pupil, Rosamond U----, was thrown in our faces all day long. If they were not so well known, I would like to write the omitted names in full, and express to Rosamond U----, if she be living, the sympathy I have since felt for her in that long-past experience common to us both; but at the time I loathed her beyond everybody, with the solitary exception of our joint governess. Rosamond was so beautiful, so good, such a perfect lady!--the continual foil to her successors. Miss H---- sniffed behind backs at everything in our house, because it was so different from what she had been accustomed to. I slept in her room--alas!--and when she was beautifying herself for the evening and father called for her at the foot of the stairs, she used to inform me, with that ugly smile of hers, that at S---- Hall Mr U---- always came upstairs to her door and escorted her to the drawing-room on his arm--he was such a perfect gentleman! She must have been a liar, than which one is accustomed to believe there is nothing worse; but she was worse--a vile woman all through. I have never in my life disclosed the horrors of the nights I spent with her; her threats of revenge, if I should do so, sealed my lips at the time, and my mortal terror of her, even after she was gone, for years more; and then I was ashamed to speak. My poor parents died ignorant of what they had exposed me to in my tender childhood. I, so extravagantly beloved and cared for! Possibly Rosamond U----'s rank saved her from the like treatment. When I think of Miss H----, and I hate to think of her--even now she could taint the English landscape--when I do think of her, it is to wish I could tell all the parents in the world about her, as a warning against the promiscuous governess and against leaving any governess unwatched.

Better the poorest boarding-school, where there is the safety of publicity, a thousand times. In L---- I had a married cousin, whose little bridesmaid I had been, and whose baby, that I was allowed to nurse on a footstool, lured me to stay with her once or twice; but I clung to her side all the time lest perchance I should sight Miss H---- half-a-mile off, after she had left our employ and lost all power over me. One day at church--great St Margaret's, so full of people--I caught a distant glimpse of the dull, sallow face, and nearly fainted as I stood.

Happily, there were other and more wholesome memories connected with that attic room. But it was still a tragedy that came first to my mind when I thought of Miss H----'s successor, Miss W----. For it was in her reign that I very nearly committed suicide.

She was not like--n.o.body was like--Miss H----, but she was not above using power unfairly when she was put out. I had been nasty to her in some way, and she returned the compliment by formulating a specific complaint of me to father--actually of _me_, his queen, to _him_, my devoted slave. She was a pretty young woman, and he, poor man, just as human as could be. He used to take her walks of an evening when he thought she needed exercise, and on other evenings would sit entranced for hours while she sang "Should he Upbraid" and "Good-bye, Sweetheart"

and "When the Swallows homeward fly," and scores of other nice things, to him. And that accounts now, although it did not then, for the astounding circ.u.mstance that he punished me at her behest. I was not whipped, of course, but I was sent to my room in disgrace and ordered to stay there. Never shall I forget my mingled astonishment, rage and despair under the unprecedented calamity. I would not have minded, I thought, if I had really done the thing she had accused me of. But I was an innocent victim, and it was father--_father_--who had been set against me! Simply I could not bear it. I resolved to put an end to my wretched existence there and then. "When he comes and finds me dead upon the floor, then he will be sorry," was the reflection that was to console me in my last moments. But, although I crept into mother's room and ransacked her medicine cupboard for the fatal dose, I did not find it; I lived to make friends with father again, and to suffer many more hours of anguish over troubles that were not worth it.

Another episode of Miss W----'s reign came to my mind when I could clear it of the smoke of the darker memories. The brother and sister next below me were the victims of her wrath on this occasion. I was away from home, and my sister was promoted to the attic room and my place in the governess's bed. She noticed, as I had done, Miss W----'s habit of performing half her evening toilet by candlelight and the rest in the dark; she discovered that the unseen part of the process consisted in dabbing the skin with Rowland's Kalydor for the improvement of a much-valued complexion. She told the second brother--a person of humour--who promptly turned the knowledge to account. Together they unearthed the secret bottle of Kalydor, adulterated the contents with ink, re-hid it in its supposed safe place. Night came, and an evening party. Miss W---- dressed herself with special care and splendour, and duly extinguished her candles before applying the finis.h.i.+ng touch. She had fine shoulders and arms, now well displayed, and was particularly careful to anoint them thoroughly with her favourite cosmetic. Then she swept downstairs. We had dark staircases and dim halls then, and somehow she did not realise the situation until the drawing-room lights and the eyes and laughs of the a.s.sembled company revealed it to her. I am sorry I did not see the dramatic denouement. There were violent hysterics, I was told, and a terrible hullabaloo. Father, in a towering pa.s.sion, rushed upstairs and thrashed the children all round, innocent and guilty together, lest he should miss out a possible partic.i.p.ant in the crime.

We had two more English governesses, and one French. One of the former had taught a family of cousins and was reported to be very clever; but she had a fiery, ungovernable temper, and did not stay long enough to prove her gifts. She was a tiny woman, and pretty in a bird-like, sharp-nosed, bright-eyed way, and she became engaged to one of the men who admired her; and one day he came to see her, and from the hall where he was taking off his hat and coat overheard her "giving tongue" to our stately youngest aunt, with her customary fierceness and fluency. She was unaware of his propinquity until he marched in to inform her that he had not really known her until that moment, and that, as a consequence of the revelation, his offer of marriage was revoked. It was characteristic of her that she turned on him with a furious repudiation of any desire whatever to be his wife. She died an elderly, if not old, maid some years later.

The other Englishwoman was a dear--and not much else. We loved her, but we did not learn much from her. As for our French companion--it was for French conversation that she was engaged--she was all the time learning English herself. Poor little Eugenie Leonie de B----! She had a white face and big, l.u.s.trous black eyes, and pretty frocks, supplied by her mother, herself a governess in an English family of higher consequence than ours. The boys used to tease Eugenie about Waterloo and frogs, and she would burst into rages and tears because her limited vocabulary denied her the power of arguing for her country on equal terms. She was a dear little thing, and we were all fond of her, and she of us; she took the place of another sister while she lived with us, and there was mutual and bitter grief when she went away. But she did not teach us French to any extent. We taught her English instead.

In short, there was not one, I am convinced, amongst them all--with the possible exception of the lady with the temper--who could have pa.s.sed a proper examination in the subjects she professed to teach. No one asked for a certificate of competency other than her own word and that of her friends. Miss W---- certainly had the warrant of the princ.i.p.al of the best ladies' school in L----, but there was no warrant for princ.i.p.als of schools. They conducted their own examinations and gave judgment in their own way, which might be any way. All I learned effectually during my brief experience of boarding-school was a long poem by N P. Willis; I was letter-perfect in it for break-up day, but, when the moment came for me to distinguish myself and the school, stage fright paralysed me and I could not utter a word. At least, that is the only scholastic achievement that I can now recall to mind.

In the final result we were able to read and write--not "cypher," in my case; and I could play the piano pretty well (by ear), and my brothers vastly better--especially the eldest--and, later on, one sister also.

But that was because music was a pa.s.sion born in us; it had to come out, wild or cultivated, and our teachers could take little credit for such proficiency as we attained. Instead of making me read scores and understand them, they played my new pieces over to me before setting me to them. It was not only a labour-saving system, but produced the most immediately effective results. I was a brilliant performer of "Woodlands" (descriptive of a gathering and bursting storm and the warbling of little birds after it), and of the "Duet in D," before I could puzzle out a hymn-tune that had not been sung or played to me. The elder brother, who went to school in L---- (whence he used to be brought home suddenly every now and then, at death's door, for mother to nurse to life again), had lessons from a master and the advantage of knowing something of the basis of the art; yet his music was before all things the instinctive speech and poetry of a soul that was not made for this prosaic world. It was hard to get him to play to listeners--to "show off" what was really a great accomplishment from the most common point of view. But in twilight and firelight, or with only me, who was his constant chum, his extemporisation was so exquisite that I used to sit and cry as I listened to it. Once a great musician listened to it, unknown to him, and told our mother that her son was destined to set the Thames on fire some day. He died at seventeen. When he was too weak to sit on the music stool by himself, I used to stand behind him and support his weight against my chest to enable him to enjoy his communion with the divine and beautiful as long as he could.

He died in March; and in June of the same year the second brother, two and a half years younger, was laid beside him. This dear boy, so sweet-tempered, so gay, so unselfish, hid facts that should have been attended to while the other was yet alive, because all his thoughts were for him and he never had any for himself, and his own life was in danger before it was known that he was ill. But an organist friend had promised him the glory of playing the whole Sunday service in a neighbouring church (St Peter's, Great Yarmouth, where we were living at the time), and, with his complaint already past hope, he went off to this task, simply full of it, and performed it triumphantly. It was his last act in life, and through all his delirium until he died his fingers were playing up and down the sheet, showing that his stricken brain made music for him to the last.

The sister was like them both in that one and only respect. She was a delightful extemporiser on the piano, expressing thus all her wayward moods as they alternated so quickly in her pa.s.sionate little soul.

Continually she surprised herself as well as us with some beautiful improvisation, and then burst into tears because she could not repeat it. And all that budding genius to be swept out of the world, without a chance to flower and bear fruit! It is a sad reflection--the waste of valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.

However, such gifts as the then numerous family could lay claim to were hidden as it were in the "plain egg of the nightingale" while our development was in the hands of the governesses. They were intellectually limited, spiritually common, all unlearned, and the majority of them underbred. The fact being that, taking the average of the seven, they fairly represented their cla.s.s--the governess cla.s.s of my young days. Naturally, in this case, we more or less fairly represented the cla.s.s of those who were supposed to be well educated.

But I must except the youngest aunt from this category. She was a governess--but not the average governess--and it was never _her_ opinion that we were well educated. She frequently deplored my own lack of opportunities to improve, and made generous, if vain, efforts to provide them. Before she entered upon her career as instructress of foreign young high-mightinesses, she spent years on her own studies abroad, and she offered to keep me at school in Germany if my parents would send me to her there. I know we were all fools, father, mother and self, but I clung to them and they clung to me, and "No, no, a thousand times no!"

was our unanimous reply. "You are standing in the child's light," wrote the youngest aunt from Heidelberg, but that was not fair, for they would have sent me and broken their hearts over it if I had wanted to go. But if the youngest aunt had invited me to join her in heaven, the joylessness of the prospect would have been the same. So she inst.i.tuted a system of correspondence, as the best she could do in the circ.u.mstances. I was to write long and regular letters to her, to which she was to reply, correcting their grammar and composition and otherwise enlightening my neglected mind. I performed my part of this contract not wholly without pleasure in it, and I have no doubt that I owe to her my first taste for literature and the bent towards authors.h.i.+p which afterwards became a fixed line. I remember that it was to her I submitted an early MS., while as yet it was a secret that I wrote stories. This one was all about moated granges and Mediaeval castles and the splendours of what I imagined to be high life. How just her criticism was! And how--naturally, on that account--it hurt my feelings then, when I was professionally so young and innocent. "A boudoir,"

smiled she, "is not a room that a lady keeps all to herself, as she does her bedroom. And she does not have 'tapers' on the dressing-table, but candles. And why don't you write what you understand?" That advice, which is of the best to-day, was astonis.h.i.+ngly good for those days.

In later years her letters were like novels themselves. Her reticence about things one burned to know concerning the private lives of her royal employers was impenetrable, but outside of that what food for the romantic imagination! There was the death of her pupil, a young princess of S----, and later the semi-dissolution of her father's kingdom--two events that the youngest aunt took bitterly to heart and discoursed of eloquently. There was that mandate of the Czar to her and another pupil, wintering in Dresden, to return instantly to St Petersburg, and the journey of the party in bullet-proof railway carriages through Poland in revolt. The train crawled along so slowly, on account of the fighting on the line, that they were nearly starved, and when it reached a station where food might be obtained no one but the youngest aunt had the pluck to leave its shelter. The English tutor of her pupil's brother (the children were fatherless wards of the Russian Emperor) cowered in his corner paralysed with fright; the youngest aunt could not find words to express her contempt for him. She gathered up her skirts--it was necessary to hold them high, she said, because the ground was running with blood--and sallied forth to forage alone, returning with a little black bread and some dirty water, procured with great difficulty and by a heavy bribe. I remember that the youngest aunt was all indignation against "ungrateful Poland," which shows how the finest judgment can be affected by the personal point of view. At the end of the perilous journey there was a solemn service of thanksgiving for the deliverance of the Lord's Anointed out of the hands of bloodthirsty rebels. Her sketches of these and other stirring scenes taught me something of the world outside my village or country town; they supplied plots for many early romances that never saw the light.

On the whole, school work was a deadly uninteresting, and therefore unprofitable, business in my time, no matter what the qualifications of teachers. The notion of making it a pleasure as well as a discipline, of breathing into its dry bones any breath of knowledgeable life, seemed not to occur to anybody. The idea that it was anything but a penalty for being young certainly never occurred to _us_. It is not surprising when one considers other aspects of the social system prevailing at the period. But it does seem strange that a theory of education so essentially stupid on the face of it should still persist to the extent we see in these more enlightened days. And yet--not so strange. Nothing is really strange when you think it out. The schools, most humanly and naturally, keep their old alliance with the Church, clinging to the old dogmas which have been the roots of their being and the symbols of their power for so long; inevitably resisting, while they can, on behalf of all sorts of vested interests, the Spirit of Progress which they must know to be ultimately irresistible. When I see growing children who have spent morning and afternoon at school f.a.gging wearily at "prep" through the evening when they ought to be recruiting with a game or in their beds, I marvel at the hidebound conservatism which can thus ignore the laws of health and the rights of the individual, freely recognised as paramount in other directions. But again--what is there to marvel at?

There are scores of good, common-sense business men to whom Compulsory Greek is a sacred thing, and there are thousands and thousands of truly saintly women who would not have a hand laid on the Athanasian Creed for anything. Not to speak of the innumerable brave fellows, souls of honour, flowers of chivalry, who believe as devoutly as they believe in G.o.d that the world would go to pieces utterly without its armies and navies.

How often we hear elderly people gus.h.i.+ng over their school days! "Ah, those were the happy days!" When I hear them I know exactly what they mean--not the school part of school days, but the free parts in between.

I am not of those who sentimentally deceive themselves in this matter--the school parts to me were never happy. I have always known it.

And when I came back to the scenes of my schooldays, when I stood in that quiet road at D---- and looked up at the window of the room under the crow-stepped gable, I realised with a shudder how unutterably wretched they had been sometimes.

But it is time I dragged my spirit eyes from that sad little nook in the house of dreams. I will not look at it again. I will take Memory through the ghost-haunted attics behind it and down the twisty stairs, to the lower floors and the garden and the company of my dear family, where she can play about much more cheerfully.

CHAPTER V

HALCYON DAYS

There is always one outstanding a.s.sociation to fly in your face ahead of every other when you encounter a thing or person once connected with your life, that has been severed from it for a long time. And when I looked at the front door like a church door, simultaneously apprehending its interesting character as a door, the first thing I thought of was--valentines.

The word says nothing to my youthful reader. But, oh, dear contemporary for whom especially I write, you who took part with me in those revels that are no more, what it says to us! Certainly our diversions of that time--when we were hardly into our teens, and when we were as innocent as we were young--were so few and simple compared with those of our children at the same age that we got more out of one of them than they do out of a miscellaneous dozen; but I am allowing for that when I say that for this particular diversion, and one or two more of a like kind, no corresponding diversion of the present day offers anything like adequate compensation. There are bloodless creatures, that forget they were ever young, who point to the Christmas card as the improved subst.i.tute for our valentine. Christmas card, indeed! So common, so obvious, so lacking in individual human interest! What nonsense!

We know why they do it. But where is the sense of frowning upon the innocent manifestations of nature in girls and boys, such as were called forth by the valentine, the sprig of mistletoe, and certain other of our games of olden times which were as gates ajar into the Promised Land, with their stolen and yet not unauthorised kisses and anonymous love-tokens? They gave honest outlet to the exuberance of healthy youth, sweet and wholesome in its free play, but corrupting in secrecy like everything deprived of air. At least such is my opinion, looking back upon the pranks of my early days. The valentines that came to me in such abundance on the 14th of February were simply symbols of so many lovers and of how they severally regarded me. Who sent this? Who sent that? Who lauds my beauty in such ardent verse? Who asks me to be his? The boy I like (though I may never have exchanged a word with him)? Or the boy I can't bear? The best of the valentine was that, as a rule, it did not tell. The pleasures of imagination and tickled curiosity were not impaired by any gross attempt on the part of the sender to trespa.s.s beyond the privilege of the day. Where, then, was the harm?

I became old enough to take my part in this delicate dalliance while we lived in D----, and it was in this house of the church door that my most interesting Valentine's Days were spent. They were indeed momentous occasions. The morning postman was not the chief purveyor of the wonderfully devised tokens; it was the personal delivery after dark that was most fruitful, as it was most exciting. On Valentine's eve or Valentine's night we sat around the fire in the music-room, eyes s.h.i.+ning, ears c.o.c.ked, muscles tense for the spring. Rat-tat-tat! We flew down the steps through the drawing-room, through the hall to the front door, to catch the visitor whose business and whose point of honour was not to let us catch him. A banged gate, a vanis.h.i.+ng shadow in the fog or snow, mocked the strained sight and hearing; but plain upon the doorstep--that very doorstep--gleamed a large white envelope enclosing a "song without words" for somebody. It might be from anybody--a boy who had only seen you at church, a greybeard friend of your father's (I was the pet of old gentlemen from babyhood), the man-servant of the house or that innocent young sweetheart of your innocent first love, who had this great chance to declare (without declaring) himself to be such. A sheaf of trophies--if you were a favourite of Fortune, as I must have been--when the day was over, and the long-continuing pleasure of conjecture, possibly of knowledge, afterwards. I do not care what anybody says, it was a great and glorious inst.i.tution.

And the mistletoe, of which I spoke just now--oh, the mistletoe! What was not enshrined for us in that insignificant bit of weed! Two leaf blades and one berry were enough to work the charm--to turn a humdrum house into a world of romance, filled with the interest of that pa.s.sion which is the most interesting thing in life, without its carking cares and its deadly responsibilities. Like a trap in the run of a wild animal, a pale sprig would be hidden for special purposes by a more ardent player of the game, but that was considered to be a breach of rules; in full view above the most frequented doorway, or at any rate in some place known to all, one of the strangest of our small symbols for big things honestly revealed itself, to be sought or shunned, dawdled or darted past, remembered or forgotten, as the case might be. It must have been a source of intensest interest to the youths and maidens making Christmas fun together, knowing what they knew, feeling what they felt, interchanging their sentimental diplomacies according to the instincts and desires of their time of life; for I know what in a lesser degree it meant to the younger children. I am sure that I was a very modest little girl (there was my treatment of my first love-letter to prove it), and that I did not walk--at any rate, that I did not run--after the little boys to whom I inclined; nevertheless, the mistletoe concerned me as much as anybody. The exquisite excitement of circ.u.mventing the boys to whom I did not incline was fun and interest enough.

It was forty years and more since I had seen mistletoe when that July I walked in the grounds of the fine old rectory in Priory Lane--the garden into which our b.a.l.l.s and arrows used to overshoot themselves--and the rector's wife, with whom I had been lunching, gathered and offered me a little sprig of green stuff.

"You don't know what that is," said she.

I did not, because it was summer and the pearly berries had not formed.