s my aunt, I think,
used to find the time heavy upon her hands, and so she took to books and
reading, and after a time even to going to lectures in the afternoon.
I began to find unexpected books upon her table: sociological books,
travels, Shaw's plays. "Hullo!" I said, at the sight of some volume of
the latter.

"I'm keeping a mind, George," she explained.

"Eh?"

"Keeping a mind. Dogs I never cared for. It's been a toss-up between
setting up a mind and setting up a soul. It's jolly lucky for Him and
you it's a mind. I've joined the London Library, and I'm going in for
the Royal Institution and every blessed lecture that comes along next
winter. You'd better look out."...

And I remember her coming in late one evening with a note-book in her
hand.

"Where ya been, Susan?" said my uncle.

"Birkbeck--Physiology. I'm getting on." She sat down and took off her
gloves. "You're just glass to me," she sighed, and then in a note of
grave reproach: "You old PACKAGE! I had no idea! The Things you've kept
from me!"

Presently they were setting; up the house at Beckengham, and my aunt
intermitted her intellectual activities. The house at Beckengham was
something of an enterprise for them at that time, a reasonably large
place by the standards of the early years of Tono-Bungay. It was a big,
rather gaunt villa, with a conservatory and a shrubbery, a tennis-lawn,
a quite considerable vegetable garden, and a small disused coach-house.
I had some glimpses of the excitements of its inauguration, but not many
because of the estrangement between my aunt and Marion.

My aunt went into that house with considerable zest, and my uncle
distinguished himself by the thoroughness with which he did the
repainting and replumbing. He had all the drains up and most of the
garden with them, and stood administrative on heaps--administrating
whisky to the workmen. I found him there one day, most Napoleonic, on
a little Elba of dirt, in an atmosphere that defies print. He also, I
remember, chose what he considered cheerful contrasts of colours for the
painting of the woodwork. This exasperated my aunt extremely--she
called him a "Pestilential old Splosher" with an unusual note of
earnestness--and he also enraged her into novelties of abuse by giving
each bedroom the name of some favourite hero--Cliff, Napoleon, Caesar,
and so forth--and having it painted on the door in gilt letters on
a black label. "Martin Luther" was kept for me. Only her