Then again, the Clementses, who live at the Grange.  I feel instinctively they are nice people, but I haven’t the least idea who she was and how he made his money, though from his acreage and his motors I am entitled to assume he has a large income.  She seems to know a lot about Spain; but I don’t feel encouraged to ask her:  “Was your father in the wine trade?  Is that why you know Xeres so well?” Clements himself has in his study an enlarged photograph of a handsome woman with a kind of mourning wreath round the frame—­beautifully carved.  Is it the portrait of a former wife?  Or of a sister who committed suicide?  Or was it merely bought in Venice for the sake of the carving?  Perhaps I shall know some day—­if it matters.  In a moment of expansion during the Railway Strike, Mrs. Clements will say:  “That was poor Walter’s first.  She died of acute dyspepsia, poor thing, on their marriage tour, and was buried at Venice.  Don’t ever allude to it because he feels it so dreadfully.”  And my curiosity will have been rewarded for its long and patient restraint.  Clements’ little finger on his left hand is mutilated.  I have never asked why—­a lawn-mowing machine?  Or a bite from some passionate mistress in a buried past?  I note silently that he disapproves of palmistry—­

But about Honoria Fraser, to whom I was introduced by Mr. George Bernard Shaw twenty years ago:  She was born in 1872, as Who’s Who will tell you; also that she was the daughter and eldest child of a famous physician (Sir Meldrum Fraser) who wrought some marvellous cures in the ’sixties, ’seventies and ’eighties, chiefly by dieting and psycho-therapy. (He got his knighthood in the first jubilee year for reducing to reasonable proportions the figure of good-hearted, thoroughly kindly, and much loved Princess Mary of Oxford.) He—­Honoria’s father—­was married to a beautiful woman, a relation of Bessie Rayner Parkes, with inherited advanced views on the Rights and Position of Woman.  Lady Fraser was, indeed, an early type of Suffragist and also wrote some poetry which was far from bad.  They had two children:  Honoria, born, as I say, in 1872; and John (John Stuart Mill Fraser was his full name—­too great a burden to be borne) four years later than Honoria, who was devoted to him, idolized him, as did his mother and father.  Honoria went to Bedford College and Newnham; John to one of the two most famous of our public schools (I need not be more precise), with Cambridge in view afterwards.

But in the case of John a tragedy occurred.  He had risen to be head of the school; statesmen with little affectation applauded him on speech days.  He had been brilliant as a batsman, was a champion swimmer, and facile princeps in the ineptitudes of the classics; and showed a dazzling originality in other studies scarcely within the school curriculum.  Further he was growing out of boy gawkiness into a handsome youth of an Apolline mould, when, on the morning of his eighteenth birthday, he was found dead in his bed, with a bottle of cyanide of potassium on the bed-table to explain why.