e.

[Illustration: "RIVERS USHERED IN MISS CONSTANCE GREY"]

Miss Grey had the Colonial directness and vividness of speech; a larger,
freer diction upon the whole than that of the Londoner born and bred;
more racy, less clipped and formal, but, in certain ways, more correct.
The society _cliche_, and the society fads of abbreviation and accent,
were missing; and in their place was an easy, idiomatic directness,
distinctly noticeable to a man like myself who had actually never been
out of England. This it was that first struck me about Miss Grey; this
and the warm brilliance of her eyes: a graphic, moving speech, a frank,
compelling gaze; both indicative, as it seemed to me, of broadly
sympathetic understanding.

I read John Crondall's kindly letter with a good deal of interest, moved
by the fact that his terse, friendly phrases recalled to me a phase of
my own life which, though no more than a couple of years past, seemed to
me wonderfully remote. I had been new to London and to Fleet Street
then, full of aspirations, of earnestness, of independent aims and
hopes; fresh from the University and the more leisured days of my life
as the son of the rector of Tarn Regis. I had had glimpses of much that
was sordid and squalid in London life, at the period John Crondall's
letter recalled, but as yet there had been no sordidness in my own life.
All that was far otherwise now, I felt. Cambridge and Dorset were a
long way from the office of _The Mass_. I thought of the greasy Teuton
nondescript for whom I had kept Miss Grey waiting, and I felt colour
rise in my face as I read John Crondall's letter:

"I expect you have been burgeoning mightily since I left London, and I
should not be surprised to learn that you have put the _Daily Gazette_
and its kind definitely behind you. You remember our talks? Tut, my dear
fellow, Liberalism, Conservatism, Radicalism--it's of not the slightest
consequence, and they're all much of a muchness. The thing is to stand
to one's duty as a citizen of the Empire, not as a member of this or
that little tin coterie; and if we stick honourably to that, nothing
else matters. You will like Constance Grey; that is why I have asked her
to look you up. She's sterling all through; her father's daughter to the
backbone. And he was the man of whom Talbot said: 'Give me two Greys,
and'--and a couple of other men he mentioned--'and a free hand, and
Whitehall could go to sleep with its head on South Africa, and