And Vivie’s eyes swam a little as she thought about the death of Mark Stansfield, and the genuine tears that flowed down the cheeks of his pupils when they learnt one raw February morning from the housekeeper of his chambers that he had died at daybreak.  “A better man never lived” they agreed.  And they were right.

And she smiled again as she thought of some amongst those pupils, the young dogs of those days, the lovers of actresses of the minor order—­ballet girls, it might have been; of the larks that went on sometimes within and without the staid precincts of the Temple.  Harmless larks they were; but such as she had to withdraw from discreetly.  She played lawn tennis with them, she fenced surprisingly well; but she had refused to join the “Devil’s Own”—­the Inns of Court Volunteers, for prudent reasons; and though it had leaked out that she was a good swimmer—­that tiresome impulsive Honoria had spread it abroad—­she resolutely declined to give proofs of her prowess in swimming baths.  Her associates were not so young as the undergraduates she had met in Newnham days:  they were an average ten years older.  Their language at times made David blush, but they had more discretion and reserve than the University student, and they respected his desire to withdraw himself into himself occasionally, and to abstain from their noisier amusements without questioning his camaraderie.

At this point in her smiling reminiscences, the wardress clanged open the door and slammed down a mug of cocoa and a slab of brown bread; and rapped out some orders in such a martinet utterance that they were difficult to understand. (Don’t be alarmed!  She isn’t about to be executed for having deceived the Benchers of the Inner Temple in 1905; she is only in prison for a suffragist offence).]

I can’t wind up this chapter somehow without more or less finishing the story of Beryl Claridge.  She has been a source of anxiety to my wife—­who has read these chapters one by one as they left my typewriter.  “Was it wise to bring her in?” “Well, but my dear, she was rather a common type of the New Woman in the early nineteen hundreds.”  “Yes—­but—­”

Of course the latent anxiety was that she might end up respectably.  And so she did.  In 1906, the first Mrs. Storrington died at Ware (Ware was where the architect husband had his legitimate home).  She had long been ill, increasingly ill of some terrible form of anaemia which had followed the birth of her fourth child.  She slowly faded away, poor thing; and about the time David was returning from a triumphant Christmas and New Year at Pontystrad—­the Curate and his young wife had made a most delightful partie carree and David had kissed the very slightly protesting Bridget under the native mistletoe—­Mrs. Storrington breathed her last, while her faithless yet long forgiven Francis knelt by her bedside in agonies of unavailing grief.