have defied an effort--had such ever been made--to remove them from
their shelves, whereon they had apparently been bedded in cement, like
mosaic. It was a room that, in its bewildering diversity, might have
broken the hearts of housemaids or decorators; untidy, without plan,
with rubbish contending successfully with museum-pieces, with the past
and present struggling in their eternal rivalry; yet, a human place, a
place full of the magnetism that is born of past happiness, a place to
which all its successive generations of sons and daughters looked back
with that softening of the heart that comes, when in, perhaps, a
far-away country, memories of youth return, and with them the thought
of home. The ladies who, constant to the saner pleasures of
conversation and tea, had disposed themselves round and about Lady
Isabel's tea-table, were of the inner circle of the friends of the
house, and owned, as is usually the case where habits and environment
are practically identical, a common point of view, and no more
diversity of opinion than is enough to stimulate conversation. Such of
them as had compelled husbands or sons to accompany them, had shaken
them off at the lawn tennis ground, and though loud cawings from the
hall indicated that certain of the more elderly males had congregated
there, the ladies in the drawing-room had, so far, been "unmolested by
either the young people or the men."

Thus, Miss Frederica Coppinger phrased it to those of her allies with
whom she was now holding sweet communion. The allies, albeit separated
by intervals of from five to ten miles of rough and often hilly road,
met with sufficient frequency to keep touch, yet not often enough to
crush the ultimate fragrance from the flower of gossip. Their most
recent meeting had taken place at the concert, which had been Larry's
last achievement before his return to Oxford, and although they had
not been oppressively hampered by the convention of silence at such
entertainments, conversation had been necessarily somewhat thwarted.

"They made quite a useful little sum at Larry's concert," said
Frederica. "Local charities--which meant the Fowl Fund, of course--and
Mr. Cotton and Father Greer. Dick said he would not support it if his
old women were not helped--abominable cheats though most of them are!"

"I _feel_ for them!" said Mrs. Kirby, intensely. "_No_ one
knows the misery and the beggary inflicted on me by the foxes that
Bill encourages about the