come to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet her father
and mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto
unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired me to
make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the Sunday after,
to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made and I bought a silk
hat, and had my reward in the first glance of admiration she ever gave
me. I wonder how many of my sex are as preposterous. I was, you see,
abandoning all my beliefs, my conventions unasked. I was forgetting
myself immensely. And there was a conscious shame in it all. Never a
word--did I breathe to Ewart--to any living soul of what was going on.

Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of people,
and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its black and
amber tapestry carpets and curtains and table-cloths, and the age and
irrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded gilt on the covers.
The windows were fortified against the intrusive eye by cheap lace
curtains and an "art pot" upon an unstable octagonal table. Several
framed Art School drawings of Marion's, bearing official South
Kensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and there was a black
and gilt piano with a hymn-book on the top of it. There were draped
mirrors over all the mantels, and above the sideboard in the dining-room
in which we sat at tea was a portrait of her father, villainously
truthful after the manner of such works. I couldn't see a trace of the
beauty I found in her in either parent, yet she somehow contrived to be
like them both.

These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three Great
Women in my mother's room, but they had not nearly so much social
knowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I remarked, they did
it with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to thank me, they said, for