le I don't like. Some people I love very deeply; others, being of a
kindly disposition, I tolerate; others again I simply detest. Now
Wellingsford, like every little country town in England, is drab with
elderly gentlewomen. As I am a funny old tabby myself, I have to mix
with them. If I refuse invitations to take tea with them, they invite
themselves to tea with me. "The poor Major," they say, "is so lonely."
And they bait their little hooks and angle for gossip of which I am
supposed--Heaven knows why--to be a sort of stocked pond. They don't
carry home much of a catch, I assure you.... Well, of some of them I am
quite fond. Mrs. Boyce, for all her shortcomings, is an old crony for
whom I entertain a sincere affection. Towards Betty's aunt, Miss
Fairfax, a harmless lady with a passion for ecclesiastical embroidery,
I maintain an attitude of benevolent neutrality. But Mrs. Holmes,
Randall's mother, and her sisters, the daughters of an eminent
publicist who seems to have reared his eminence on bones of talk flung
at him by Carlisle, George Eliot, Lewes, Monckton Milnes, and is now,
doubtless, recording their toe-prints on the banks of Acheron, I never
could and never can abide. My angel of a wife saw good in them, and she
loved the tiny Randall, of whom I too was fond; so, for her sake, I
always treated them with courtesy and kindness. Also for Randall's
father's sake. He was a bluff, honest, stock-broking Briton who fancied
pigeons and bred greyhounds for coursing, and cared less for literature
and art than does the equally honest Mrs. Marigold in my kitchen. But
his wife and her sisters led what they called the intellectual life.
They regarded it as a heritage from their pompous ass of a father. Of
course they were not eighteen-sixty, or even eighteen-eighty. They
prided themselves on developing the hereditary tradition of culture to
its extreme modern expression. They were of the semi-intellectual type
of idiot--and, if it destroys it, the great war will have some
justification--which professes to find in the dull analysis of the drab
adultery and suicide of a German or Scandinavian rabbit-picker a
supreme expression of human existence. All their talk was of Hauptmann
and Sudermann (they dropped them patriotically, I must say, as
outrageous fellows, on the outbreak of war), Strindberg,
Dostoievsky--though I found they had never read either "Crime and
Punishment" or "The Brothers Karamazoff"--Tolstoi, whom they didn't