ntertaining their own friends and equals at small flowery
dinner-parties in Morris-papered rooms, where the food and wine mattered
little, and good talk and happy comradeship were the real fare.
Meanwhile the same young mothers were going to lectures on the Angevins,
or reading Goethe or Dante in the evenings--a few friends together,
gathering at each other's houses; then were discussing politics and
social reform; and generally doing their best--unconsciously--to silence
the croakers and misogynists who maintained that when all the girl
babies in the perambulators were grown up, and Oxford was flooded with
womenkind like all other towns, Oxford would have gone to "Death and
damnation."

But Mrs. Hooper, poor lady, was not of this young and wholesome
generation. She was the daughter of a small Midland manufacturer, who
had rushed into sudden wealth, for a few years, had spent it all in
riotous living, over a period just sufficient to spoil his children, and
had then died leaving them penniless. Ewen Hooper had come across her
when he was lecturing at a northern university, immediately after his
own appointment at Oxford. He had passed a harassed and penurious youth,
was pining for a home. In ten days he was engaged to this girl whom he
met at the house of a Manchester professor. She took but little wooing,
was indeed so enchanted to be wooed that Ewen Hooper soon imagined
himself in love with her; and all was done.

Nor indeed had it answered so badly for him--for a time. She had given
him children, and a home, though an uncomfortable one. Greek scholarship
and Greek beauty were the real idols of his heart and imagination. They
did not fail him. But his wife did him one conspicuous ill turn. From
the first days of their marriage, she ran her husband badly into debt;
and things had got slowly worse with the years. Mrs. Hooper was the most
wasteful of managers; servants came and went interminably; and while
money oozed away, there was neither comfort nor luxury to show for it.
As the girls grew up, they learnt to dread the sound of the front
doorbell, which so often meant an angry tradesman; and Ewen Hooper, now
that he was turning grey, lived amid a perpetual series of mean
annoyances with which he was never meant to cope, and which he was now
beginning to hand over, helplessly, to his younger daughter Nora, the
one member of the family who showed some power to deal with them.

The situation had been almost acute, when