scorn of the fashion, were at the same time excellent hostesses, keeping open house on Sundays for their husbands’ undergraduate pupils, and gallantly entertaining their own friends and equals at small flowery dinner-parties in Morris-papered rooms, where the food and wine mattered little, and good talk and happy comradeship were the real fare.  Meanwhile the same young mothers were going to lectures on the Angevins, or reading Goethe or Dante in the evenings—­a few friends together, gathering at each other’s houses; then were discussing politics and social reform; and generally doing their best—­unconsciously—­to silence the croakers and misogynists who maintained that when all the girl babies in the perambulators were grown up, and Oxford was flooded with womenkind like all other towns, Oxford would have gone to “Death and damnation.”

But Mrs. Hooper, poor lady, was not of this young and wholesome generation.  She was the daughter of a small Midland manufacturer, who had rushed into sudden wealth, for a few years, had spent it all in riotous living, over a period just sufficient to spoil his children, and had then died leaving them penniless.  Ewen Hooper had come across her when he was lecturing at a northern university, immediately after his own appointment at Oxford.  He had passed a harassed and penurious youth, was pining for a home.  In ten days he was engaged to this girl whom he met at the house of a Manchester professor.  She took but little wooing, was indeed so enchanted to be wooed that Ewen Hooper soon imagined himself in love with her; and all was done.

Nor indeed had it answered so badly for him—­for a time.  She had given him children, and a home, though an uncomfortable one.  Greek scholarship and Greek beauty were the real idols of his heart and imagination.  They did not fail him.  But his wife did him one conspicuous ill turn.  From the first days of their marriage, she ran her husband badly into debt; and things had got slowly worse with the years.  Mrs. Hooper was the most wasteful of managers; servants came and went interminably; and while money oozed away, there was neither comfort nor luxury to show for it.  As the girls grew up, they learnt to dread the sound of the front doorbell, which so often meant an angry tradesman; and Ewen Hooper, now that he was turning grey, lived amid a perpetual series of mean annoyances with which he was never meant to cope, and which he was now beginning to hand over, helplessly, to his younger daughter Nora, the one member of the family who showed some power to deal with them.

The situation had been almost acute, when Lord Risborough died.  But there was a legacy in his will for Ewen Hooper which had given a breathing space; and Connie had readily consented to pay a year’s maintenance in advance.  Yet still the drawer of bills, on which Nora kept anxious watch, was painfully full; and of late the perennial difficulty of ready money had reappeared.