“We shall be most grateful for a guide.”

“We should be even more grateful for an excuse to call on this inoffensive young man and his mother at eleven o’clock in the morning,” objected Kew.

“He ought to be at the Front,” was the excuse provided by Cousin Gustus.

“So ought I,” sighed Kew.

“Oh, but you’re a wounded, aren’t you?” asked the admirer.  There were signs of a possible transfer of admiration, and Mrs. Gustus interposed with presence of mind.

“We’ll start,” she said.  “Don’t let’s be hampered in the beginning of our quest by social littleness.”

She was conscious that she looked handsome enough for any breach of convention.  She wore an unusual shaped dress the colour of vanilla ice.  Instead of doing her hair as usual in one severe penny bun at the back, she had constructed a halfpenny bun, so to speak, over each ear.  This is a very literary way of doing the hair, and the remembrance of the admirer, haunting Anonyma’s waking thoughts, had inspired the change.

Their way lay through the beechwood that embroiders the hem of the down’s cloak.  There are only two colours in a beechwood after rain, lilac and green.  A bank of violets is not more pure in colour than a beech trunk shining in the sun.  The two colours answered one another, fainter and fainter, away and away, to the end of one’s sight, and there were two cuckoos, hidden in the dream, mocking each other in velvet voices.  The view between the trees was made up of horizons that tilted one’s chin.  The bracken, very young, on an opposite slope, was like a cloud of green wings alighting.  But the look of their destination disappointed them.

“This house faces south,” said Kew.

“I feel sure—­” began Mr. Russell, but Mrs. Gustus said: 

“As we are here, we might ask.  To be sure, the cliff is rather tame.”

“But there is an aeroplane,” persisted the admirer.

“Now pause, Anonyma,” Kew warned her.  “Pause and consider what you are going to say.”

“Consideration only unearths difficulties,” laughed Anonyma.  “Best go forward in faith and fearlessness.”

She was under the impression that she constantly laughed in a nicely naughty way at Kew’s excessive conventionality.

As they drew nearer to the cliff, it grew tamer and tamer.  The house, too, became dangerously like a villa; a super-villa, to be sure, and not in its first offensive youth, but still closely connected with the villa tribe.  Its complexion was a bilious yellow, and it had red-rimmed windows.  It was close to the sea, however, and its windows, with their blinds drawn down against the sun, looked like eyes downcast towards the beach.

There was no lodge, and the Family walked in silence through the gate.  Mr. Russell’s Hound went first with a defiant expression about his tail.  That expression cost him dear.  Inside the gate there stood a large vulgar dog, without a tail to speak of.  Its parting was crooked, its hair was in its eyes.  All these personal disadvantages the Family had time to note, while the dog gazed incredulously at Mr. Russell’s Hound.