“But good gracious,” exclaimed the aunt, bouncing into an attitude of scandalised defence, “we are leading reasonable existences!  What on earth do you mean by trammels?  We are merely trammelled by the ordinary decent conventions of civilised society.”

“We are trammelled,” said the niece, calmly and pitilessly, “by restrictions of income and opportunity, and above all by lack of initiative.  To some people a restricted income doesn’t matter a bit, in fact it often seems to help as a means for getting a lot of reality out of life; I am sure there are men and women who do their shopping in little back streets of Paris, buying four carrots and a shred of beef for their daily sustenance, who lead a perfectly real and eventful existence.  Lack of initiative is the thing that really cripples one, and that is where you and I and Uncle James are so hopelessly shut in.  We are just so many animals stuck down on a Mappin terrace, with this difference in our disfavour, that the animals are there to be looked at, while nobody wants to look at us.  As a matter of fact there would be nothing to look at.  We get colds in winter and hay fever in summer, and if a wasp happens to sting one of us, well, that is the wasp’s initiative, not ours; all we do is to wait for the swelling to go down.  Whenever we do climb into local fame and notice, it is by indirect methods; if it happens to be a good flowering year for magnolias the neighbourhood observes:  ’Have you seen the Gurtleberry’s magnolia?  It is a perfect mass of flowers,’ and we go about telling people that there are fifty-seven blossoms as against thirty-nine the previous year.”

“In Coronation year there were as many as sixty,” put in the aunt, “your uncle has kept a record for the last eight years.”

“Doesn’t it ever strike you,” continued the niece relentlessly, “that if we moved away from here or were blotted out of existence our local claim to fame would pass on automatically to whoever happened to take the house and garden?  People would say to one another, ’Have you seen the Smith-Jenkins’ magnolia?  It is a perfect mass of flowers,’ or else ’Smith-Jenkins tells me there won’t be a single blossom on their magnolia this year; the east winds have turned all the buds black.’  Now if, when we had gone, people still associated our names with the magnolia tree, no matter who temporarily possessed it, if they said, ’Ah, that’s the tree on which the Gurtleberrys hung their cook because she sent up the wrong kind of sauce with the asparagus,’ that would be something really due to our own initiative, apart from anything east winds or magnolia vitality might have to say in the matter.”

“We should never do such a thing,” said the aunt.

The niece gave a reluctant sigh.