ember of
Parliament, and Rose really knew social personages of the day. I doubt if
he was ever quite in sympathy with the idea of the place, but I used to
feel that his presence was a wholesome sort of corrective, like the vinegar
in the salad. I believe he was writing a play, but he has done nothing
since in literature, and was in many ways more like a visitor than an
inmate.

Then came my friend Vincent, a solid, good-natured, hard-working man, with
a real enthusiasm for literature, not very critical or even imaginative,
but with a faculty for clear and careful writing. He was at work on a
realistic novel, which made some little reputation; but he has become
since, what I think he always was meant to be, an able journalist and an
excellent leader-writer on political and social topics. Vincent was the
most interested of all of us in current affairs, but at the same time had a
quiet sort of enthusiasm, and a power of idealising people, ardently but
unsentimentally, which made him the most loyal of friends.

The only other person of whom we saw anything was the Vicar of the
parish--a safe, decorous, useful man, a distant cousin of Father Payne's.
His wife was a good-humoured and conventional woman. Their two daughters
were pleasant, unaffected girls, just come to womanhood. Lestrange
afterwards married one of them.

We were not much troubled by sociabilities. The place was rather isolated,
and Father Payne had the reputation of being something of an eccentric.
Moreover, the big neighbouring domain, Whitbury Park, blocked all access to
north and west. The owner was an old and invalid peer, who lived a very
secluded life and entertained no one. To the south there was nothing for
miles but farms and hamlets, while the only near neighbour in the east was
a hunting squire, who thought Father Payne kept a sort of boarding-house,
and ignored him entirely. The result was that callers were absolutely
unknown, and the wildest form of dissipation was that Pollard and Rose
occasionally played lawn-tennis at neighbouring vicarages.

We were not often all there together, because Father Payne's scheme of
travel was strictly adhered to. He considered it a very integral part of
our life. I never quite knew what his plan was; but he would send a man
off, generally alone, with a solid sum for travelling expenses. Thus
Lestrange was sent for a month to Berlin when Joachim held court there, or
to Dresden and Munich. I remember Pollard and