from me--those now lost
assurances. Suddenly I knew I had not understood. Suddenly I saw her
tenderly; remembered not so much tender or kindly things of her as her
crossed wishes and the ways in which I had thwarted her. Surprisingly
I realised that behind all her hardness and severity she had loved me,
that I was the only thing she had ever loved and that until this moment
I had never loved her. And now she was there and deaf and blind to me,
pitifully defeated in her designs for me, covered from me so that she
could not know....

I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, I set my teeth, but tears
blinded me, sobs would have choked me had speech been required of me.
The old vicar read on, there came a mumbled response--and so on to the
end. I wept as it were internally, and only when we had come out of the
churchyard could I think and speak calmly again.

Stamped across this memory are the little black figures of my uncle and
Rabbits, telling Avebury, the sexton and undertaker, that "it had all
passed off very well--very well indeed."

VIII

That is the last I shall tell of Bladesover. The dropscene falls on
that, and it comes no more as an actual presence into this novel. I
did indeed go back there once again, but under circumstances quite
immaterial to my story. But in a sense Bladesover has never left me;
it is, as I said at the outset, one of those dominant explanatory
impressions that make the framework of my mind. Bladesover illuminates
England; it has become all that is spacious, dignified pretentious, and
truly conservative in English life. It is my social datum. That is why I
have drawn it here on so large a scale.

When I came back at last to the real Bladesover on an inconsequent
visit, everything was far smaller than I could have supposed possible.
It was as though everything had shivered and shrivelled a little at the
Lichtenstein touch. The harp was still in the saloon, but there was a
different grand piano with a painted lid and a metrostyle pianola, and
an extraordinary quantity of artistic litter and bric-a-brac scattered
about. There was the trail of the Bond Street showroom over it all. The
furniture was still under chintz, but it wasn't the same sort of chintz
although it pretended to be, and the lustre-dangling chandeliers had
passed away. Lady Lichtenstein's books replaced the brown volumes I
had browsed among--they were mostly presentation copies of contemporary
novels and the National Rev