somehow a relief to them. But, on the whole, in these first years
of the twentieth century, the Alardyces and their relations were keeping
their heads well above water. One finds them at the tops of professions,
with letters after their names; they sit in luxurious public offices,
with private secretaries attached to them; they write solid books in
dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great universities, and
when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his
biography.

Now the source of this nobility was, of course, the poet, and his
immediate descendants, therefore, were invested with greater luster than
the collateral branches. Mrs. Hilbery, in virtue of her position as
the only child of the poet, was spiritually the head of the family, and
Katharine, her daughter, had some superior rank among all the cousins
and connections, the more so because she was an only child. The
Alardyces had married and intermarried, and their offspring were
generally profuse, and had a way of meeting regularly in each
other's houses for meals and family celebrations which had acquired
a semi-sacred character, and were as regularly observed as days of
feasting and fasting in the Church.

In times gone by, Mrs. Hilbery had known all the poets, all the
novelists, all the beautiful women and distinguished men of her time.
These being now either dead or secluded in their infirm glory, she
made her house a meeting-place for her own relations, to whom she would
lament the passing of the great days of the nineteenth century, when
every department of letters and art was represented in England by two or
three illustrious names. Where are their successors? she would ask, and
the absence of any poet or painter or novelist of the true caliber at
the present day was a text upon which she liked to ruminate, in a sunset
mood of benignant reminiscence, which it would have been hard to disturb
had there been need. But she was far from visiting their inferiority
upon the younger generation. She welcomed them very heartily to her
house, told them her stories, gave them sovereigns and ices and good
advice, and weaved round them romances which had generally no likeness
to the truth.

The quality of her birth oozed into Katharine's consciousness from a
dozen different sources as soon as she was able to perceive anything.
Above her nursery fireplace hung a photograph of her grandfather's tomb
in Poets' Corner, and she was told in