silk and become a Judge.”  Crofts moved from where he sat next to a Bishop. ("Damn it all!  I like bein’ respectable, but why will they always put me next a Bishop or an Archdeacon?  It spoils all my best stories.”) He came over—­dragging his chair—­to Rossiter and said “I say!  Will you introduce me to our young friend here?” He was duly introduced.  “H’m, Williams? That doesn’t tell me much.  But somehow your face reminds me awfully of—­of—­some one I used to know.  J’ever have a sister?” “No,” said David.

Crofts, he noticed, had aged very much in the intervening eight years.  He must now be no more than—­58?  But he had become very stout and obviously suffered from blood pressure without knowing it.  He moved away a little, and David heard him talking to a Master about Lady Crofts, who had come up to London for the season and how they were both very anxious about his boy—­“Yes, he had two children, a boy and a girl, bless ’em—­The boy had been ill with measles and wasn’t makin’ quite the quick recovery they expected.  What an anxiety children were, weren’t they?  Though we wouldn’t be without ’em, would we?” The Bencher assented out of civility, though as a matter of fact he was an old bachelor and detested children or anything younger than twenty-one.

David after his call was presented with a bill to pay of L99. 10_s._ His father hearing of this, insisted on sending him a cheque for L150 out of his savings, adding he should be deeply hurt if it was not accepted and no more said about it.  How soon was David coming down to see South Wales once more gloriously clothed with spring?

[Much of this review of the years between 1901 and 1905, many of these sweet remembrances are being taken from Vivie’s brain as she lies on a hard bed in 1913, musing over the past days when, despite occasional frights and anxieties, she was transcendently happy.  Oh “Sorrow’s Crown of Sorrow, the remembering happier days!” She recalled the articles she used to write from the Common Room or Library of the Inn; how well they were received and paid for by the editors of daily and weekly journals; what a lark they were, when for instance she would raise a debate in the Saturday Review:  “Should Women be admitted to the Bar?” Or an appeal in the Daily News to do away with the Disabilities of Women.  How poor Stansfield, before he died, said he had never met any young fellow with a tenderer heart for women, and advised him to marry whilst he still had youth and fire.  She remembered David’s social success at the great houses in the West End.  How he might have gone out into Society and shone more, much more, only he had to consider prudence and expense; the curious women who fell in love with him, and whom he had gently, tactfully to keep at arm’s length.  She remembered the eager discussions in the Temple Debating Society, or at the “Moots” of Gray’s Inn, her successes there as an orator and a close reasoner; how boy students formed ardent friendships for her and prophesied her future success in Parliament, would have her promise to take them into the Cabinet which David was to form when an electorate swept him into power and sent the antiquated old rotters of that day into the limbo of deserved occlusion.