respect for
domestic discipline, she said, prevented her retaliating with "Old
Pondo" on the housemaid's cupboard.

Also he went and ordered one of the completest sets of garden requisites
I have ever seen--and had them all painted a hard clear blue. My aunt
got herself large tins of a kindlier hued enamel and had everything
secretly recoated, and this done, she found great joy in the garden and
became an ardent rose grower and herbaceous borderer, leaving her Mind,
indeed, to damp evenings and the winter months. When I think of her at
Beckenham, I always think first of her as dressed in that blue cotton
stuff she affected, with her arms in huge gauntleted gardening gloves, a
trowel in one hand and a small but no doubt hardy and promising annual,
limp and very young-looking and sheepish, in the other.

Beckenham, in the persons of a vicar, a doctor's wife, and a large proud
lady called Hogberry, "called" on my uncle and aunt almost at once, so
soon in fact as the lawn was down again, and afterwards my aunt made
friends with a quiet gentlewoman next door, a propos of an overhanging
cherry tree and the need of repairing the party fence. So she resumed
her place in society from which she had fallen with the disaster of
Wimblehurst. She made a partially facetious study of the etiquette of
her position, had cards engraved and retaliated calls. And then she
received a card for one of Mrs. Hogberry's At Homes, gave an old garden
party herself, participated in a bazaar and sale of work, and was really
becoming quite cheerfully entangled in Beckenham society when she was
suddenly taken up by the roots again by my uncle and transplanted to
Chiselhurst.

"Old Trek, George," she said compactly, "Onward and Up," when I found
her superintending the loading of two big furniture vans. "Go up and say
good-bye to 'Martin Luther,' and then I'll see what you can do to help
me."

II

I look into the jumbled stores of the middle distance of memory, and
Beckenham seems to me a quite transitory phase. But really they were
there several years; through nearly all my married life, in fact,
and far longer than the year and odd months we lived together at
Wimblehurst. But the Wimblehurst time with them is fuller in my memory
by far then the Beckenham period. There comes back to me with a quite
considerable amount of detail the effect of that garden party of my
aunt's and of a little social misbehaviour of which I was guilty on that
occasion.