Some weeks before Alfred’s arrival, Laura had been much disturbed by hearing that we were considered “fast”; she told me that receiving men at midnight in our bedroom shocked people and that we ought, perhaps, to give it up.  I listened closely to what she had to say, and at the end remarked that it appeared to me to be quite absurd.  Godfrey Webb agreed with me and said that people who were easily shocked were like women who sell stale pastry in cathedral towns; and he advised us to take no notice whatever of what any one said.  We hardly knew the meaning of the word “fast” and, as my mother went to bed punctually at eleven, it was unthinkable that men and women friends should not be allowed to join us.  Our bedroom had been converted by me out of the night-nursery into a sitting-room.  The shutters were removed and book-shelves put in their place, an idea afterwards copied by my friends.  The Morris carpet and chintzes I had discovered for myself and chosen in London; and my walls were ornamented with curious objects, varying from caricatures and crucifixes to prints of prize-fights, fox-hunts, Virgins and Wagner.  In one of the turrets I hung my clothes; in the other I put an altar on which I kept my books of prayer and a skull which was given to me by the shepherd’s son and which is on my bookshelf now; we wore charming dressing-jackets and sat up in bed with coloured cushions behind our backs, while the brothers and their friends sat on the floor or in comfortable chairs round the room.  On these occasions the gas was turned low, a brilliant fire made up and either a guest or one of us would read by the light of a single candle, tell ghost-stories or discuss current affairs:  politics, people and books.  Not only the young, but the old men came to our gatherings.  I remember Jowett reading out aloud to us Thomas Hill Green’s lay sermons; and when he had finished I asked him how much he had loved Green, to which he replied: 

“I did not love him at all.”

That these midnight meetings should shock any one appeared fantastic; and as most people in the house agreed with me, they were continued.

It was not this alone that disturbed Laura; she wanted to marry a serious, manly fellow, but as she was a great flirt, other types of a more brilliant kind obscured this vision and she had become profoundly undecided over her own love-affairs; they had worked so much upon her nerves that when Mr. Lyttelton came to Glen she was in bed with acute neuralgia and unable to see him.

My father welcomed Alfred warmly, for, apart from his charming personality, he was Gladstone’s nephew and had been brought up in the Liberal creed.