thing to do with me
except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the
definite escape from Canterbury.

For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her. She was one of
nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters. The Minor Canon had only
been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son
at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is
pretty expensive too if you're as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I
mention Bertie because, though he doesn't come into this story, his
stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation
considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry
off two of her seven daughters. Of the others, one (the one who had been
to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home;
one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three
girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their
heads off.

These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by
way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have
revolted anyway. She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and
vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close,
besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things. To do them
with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the
velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the
Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury
is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I
suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the
garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the
garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It
is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven
sisters will _all_ marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs.
Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always
bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because
they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in
the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called
"literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of
an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors'
manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the