night before, that, when the time came, one of their sons should marry
one of their daughters. Mrs Ashburnham had been a Powys and remained
Mrs Powys' dearest friend. They had drifted about the world as English
soldiers do, seldom meeting, but their women always in correspondence
one with another. They wrote about minute things such as the teething of
Edward and of the earlier daughters or the best way to repair a Jacob's
ladder in a stocking. And, if they met seldom, yet it was often enough
to keep each other's personalities fresh in their minds, gradually
growing a little stiff in the joints, but always with enough to talk
about and with a store of reminiscences. Then, as his girls began
to come of age when they must leave the convent in which they were
regularly interned during his years of active service, Colonel Powys
retired from the army with the necessity of making a home for them. It
happened that the Ashburnhams had never seen any of the Powys girls,
though, whenever the four parents met in London, Edward Ashburnham was
always of the party. He was at that time twenty-two and, I believe,
almost as pure in mind as Leonora herself. It is odd how a boy can have
his virgin intelligence untouched in this world.

That was partly due to the careful handling of his mother, partly to the
fact that the house to which he went at Winchester had a particularly
pure tone and partly to Edward's own peculiar aversion from anything
like coarse language or gross stories. At Sandhurst he had just kept
out of the way of that sort of thing. He was keen on soldiering, keen on
mathematics, on land-surveying, on politics and, by a queer warp of his
mind, on literature. Even when he was twenty-two he would pass hours
reading one of Scott's novels or the Chronicles of Froissart. Mrs
Ashburnham considered that she was to be congratulated, and almost every
week she wrote to Mrs Powys, dilating upon her satisfaction.

Then, one day, taking a walk down Bond Street with her son, after having
been at Lord's, she noticed Edward suddenly turn his head round to take
a second look at a well-dressed girl who had passed them. She wrote
about that, too, to Mrs Powys, and expressed some alarm. It had been,
on Edward's part, the merest reflex action. He was so very abstracted at
that time owing to the pressure his crammer was putting upon him that he
certainly hadn't known what he was doing.

It was this letter of Mrs Ashburnham's to Mrs Powys that h