In a few weeks’ time Alethea did choose to go and live at Roughborough.  A house was found with a field and a nice little garden which suited her very well.  “At any rate,” she said to herself, “I will have fresh eggs and flowers.”  She even considered the question of keeping a cow, but in the end decided not to do so.  She furnished her house throughout anew, taking nothing whatever from her establishment in Gower Street, and by Michaelmas—­for the house was empty when she took it—­she was settled comfortably, and had begun to make herself at home.

One of Miss Pontifex’s first moves was to ask a dozen of the smartest and most gentlemanly boys to breakfast with her.  From her seat in church she could see the faces of the upper-form boys, and soon made up her mind which of them it would be best to cultivate.  Miss Pontifex, sitting opposite the boys in church, and reckoning them up with her keen eyes from under her veil by all a woman’s criteria, came to a truer conclusion about the greater number of those she scrutinized than even Dr Skinner had done.  She fell in love with one boy from seeing him put on his gloves.

Miss Pontifex, as I have said, got hold of some of these youngsters through Ernest, and fed them well.  No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman.  Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect—­give them a bone and they will like you at once.  Alethea employed every other little artifice which she thought likely to win their allegiance to herself, and through this their countenance for her nephew.  She found the football club in a slight money difficulty and at once gave half a sovereign towards its removal.  The boys had no chance against her, she shot them down one after another as easily as though they had been roosting pheasants.  Nor did she escape scathless herself, for, as she wrote to me, she quite lost her heart to half a dozen of them.  “How much nicer they are,” she said, “and how much more they know than those who profess to teach them!”

I believe it has been lately maintained that it is the young and fair who are the truly old and truly experienced, inasmuch as it is they who alone have a living memory to guide them; “the whole charm,” it has been said, “of youth lies in its advantage over age in respect of experience, and when this has for some reason failed or been misapplied, the charm is broken.  When we say that we are getting old, we should say rather that we are getting new or young, and are suffering from inexperience; trying to do things which we have never done before, and failing worse and worse, till in the end we are landed in the utter impotence of death.”

Miss Pontifex died many a long year before the above passage was written, but she had arrived independently at much the same conclusion.