“But little Phoebe!” said the bishop.

“Kitty,” said Lady Ella, “has written a novel.”

“Already!”

“With elopements in it—­and all sorts of things.  She’s had it typed.  You’d think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter go flourishing the family imagination about in that way.”

“Eleanor told you?”

“By way of showing that they think of—­things in general.”

The bishop reflected.  “She wants to go to College.”

“They want to go in a set.”

“I wonder if college can be much worse than school....  She’s eighteen—?  But I will talk to her....”

(10)

All our children are changelings.  They are perpetually fresh strangers.  Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday’s child until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.

The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young.  He learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.

He went into the dining-room.  He went in as carelessly as possible and smoking a cigarette.  He had an honourable dread of being portentous in his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside.  Eleanor had finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one hand holding her sprained wrist.

“Well,” he said, and strolled to the hearthrug.  He had had an odd idea that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had described her, a little girl in a scrape.  But she had changed into her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she had ever been to him before.  She was dark like her mother, but not of the same willowy type; she had more of her father’s sturdy build, and she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis.  The firelight brought out the gracious reposeful lines of a body that ripened in adolescence.  And though there was a vibration of resolution in her voice she spoke like one who is under her own control.

“Mother has told you that I have disgraced myself,” she began.

“No,” said the bishop, weighing it.  “No.  But you seem to have been indiscreet, little Norah.”

“I got excited,” she said.  “They began turning out the other women—­roughly.  I was indignant.”

“You didn’t go to interrupt?” he asked.

She considered.  “No,” she said.  “But I went.”

He liked her disposition to get it right.  “On that side,” he assisted.

“It isn’t the same thing as really meaning, Daddy,” she said.

“And then things happened?”

“Yes,” she said to the fire.

A pause followed.  If they had been in a law-court, her barrister would have said, “That is my case, my lord.”  The bishop prepared to open the next stage in the proceedings.

“I think, Norah, you shouldn’t have been there at all,” he said.