ng of that relationship she had been
just married off to him. She had been one of seven daughters in a bare,
untidy Irish manor-house to which she had returned from the convent I
have so often spoken of. She had left it just a year and she was just
nineteen. It is impossible to imagine such inexperience as was hers.
You might almost say that she had never spoken to a man except a priest.
Coming straight from the convent, she had gone in behind the high walls
of the manor-house that was almost more cloistral than any convent could
have been. There were the seven girls, there was the strained mother,
there was the worried father at whom, three times in the course of that
year, the tenants took pot-shots from behind a hedge. The women-folk,
upon the whole, the tenants respected. Once a week each of the girls,
since there were seven of them, took a drive with the mother in the old
basketwork chaise drawn by a very fat, very lumbering pony. They paid
occasionally a call, but even these were so rare that, Leonora has
assured me, only three times in the year that succeeded her coming home
from the convent did she enter another person's house. For the rest of
the time the seven sisters ran about in the neglected gardens between
the unpruned espaliers. Or they played lawn-tennis or fives in an angle
of a great wall that surrounded the garden--an angle from which the
fruit trees had long died away. They painted in water-colour; they
embroidered; they copied verses into albums. Once a week they went to
Mass; once a week to the confessional, accompanied by an old nurse. They
were happy since they had known no other life.

It appeared to them a singular extravagance when, one day, a
photographer was brought over from the county town and photographed them
standing, all seven, in the shadow of an old apple tree with the grey
lichen on the raddled trunk. But it wasn't an extravagance.

Three weeks before Colonel Powys had written to Colonel Ashburnham:

"I say, Harry, couldn't your Edward marry one of my girls? It would be
a god-send to me, for I'm at the end of my tether and, once one girl
begins to go off, the rest of them will follow." He went on to say that
all his daughters were tall, upstanding, clean-limbed and absolutely
pure, and he reminded Colonel Ashburnham that, they having been married
on the same day, though in different churches, since the one was a
Catholic and the other an Anglican--they had said to each other, the