esistible appeal to those instincts for which a democracy has
neglected to provide. Wentworth, with its "tone," its backward
references, its inflexible aversions and condemnations, its hard moral
outline preserved intact against a whirling background of experiment,
had been all the poetry and history of Margaret Ransom's life. Yes,
what she had really esteemed in her husband was the fact of his being
so intense an embodiment of Wentworth; so long and closely identified,
for instance, with its legal affairs, that he was almost a part of its
university existence, that of course, at a college banquet, he would
inevitably speak for the bar!

It was wonderful of how much consequence all this had seemed till
now....

II

WHEN, punctually at ten minutes to seven, her husband had emerged from
the house, Margaret Ransom remained seated in her bedroom, addressing
herself anew to the difficult process of self-collection. As an aid to
this endeavour, she bent forward and looked out of the window,
following Ransom's figure as it receded down the elm-shaded street. He
moved almost alone between the prim flowerless grass-plots, the white
porches, the protrusion of irrelevant shingled gables, which stamped
the empty street as part of an American college town. She had always
been proud of living in Hill Street, where the university people
congregated, proud to associate her husband's retreating back, as he
walked daily to his office, with backs literary and pedagogic, backs of
which it was whispered, for the edification of duly-impressed visitors:
"Wait till that old boy turns--that's so-and-so."

This had been her world, a world destitute of personal experience, but
filled with a rich sense of privilege and distinction, of being not as
those millions were who, denied the inestimable advantage of living at
Wentworth, pursued elsewhere careers foredoomed to futility by that
very fact.

And now--!

She rose and turned to her work-table where she had dropped, on
entering, the handful of photographs that Guy Dawnish had left with
her. While he sat so close, pointing out and explaining, she had hardly
taken in the details; but now, on the full tones of his low young
voice, they came back with redoubled distinctness. This was Guise
Abbey, his uncle's place in Wiltshire, where, under his grandfather's
rule, Guy's own boyhood had been spent: a long gabled Jacobean facade,
many-chimneyed, ivy-draped, overhung (she felt sure) by the bou