estern counties that
it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy's taste;
it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood it
all the better because it was empty. Oxford is--Oxford; not a mere
receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to
love it rather than to love one another; such at all events was to
be its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make
friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had
severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford
remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory of
a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.

It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister talking. They did
not get on overwell as a rule. For a few moments she listened to them,
feeling elderly and benign.

Then something occurred to her, and she interrupted.

"Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilcox; that sad business?"

"Yes."

"I have had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the estate,
and wrote to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have anything.
I thought it good of him, considering I knew her so little. I said that
she had once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we both forgot
about it afterwards."

"I hope Charles took the hint."

"Yes--that is to say, her husband wrote later on, and thanked me for
being a little kind to her, and actually gave me her silver vinaigrette.
Don't you think that is extraordinarily generous? It has made me
like him very much. He hopes that this will not be the end of our
acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Evie some time in
the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking up his work--rubber--it is
a big business. I gather he is launching out rather. Charles is in it,
too. Charles is married--a pretty little creature, but she doesn't seem
wise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone off to a house of
their own."

Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How
quickly a situation changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in
November she could blush and be unnatural; now it was January and
the whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months,
Margaret realised the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its
difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by
historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead
nowh