It's like a scrap from another life. It's all set in what is
for me a kind of cutaneous feeling, the feeling of rather ill-cut city
clothes, frock coat and grey trousers, and of a high collar and tie
worn in sunshine among flowers. I have still a quite vivid memory of the
little trapezoidal lawn, of the gathering, and particularly of the
hats and feathers of the gathering, of the parlour-maid and the blue
tea-cups, and of the magnificent presence of Mrs. Hogberry and of her
clear, resonant voice. It was a voice that would have gone with a garden
party on a larger scale; it went into adjacent premises; it included the
gardener who was far up the vegetable patch and technically out of play.
The only other men were my aunt's doctor, two of the clergy, amiable
contrasted men, and Mrs. Hogberry's imperfectly grown-up son, a youth
just bursting into collar. The rest were women, except for a young girl
or so in a state of speechless good behaviour. Marion also was there.

Marion and I had arrived a little estranged, and I remember her as
a silent presence, a shadow across all that sunlit emptiness of
intercourse. We had embittered each other with one of those miserable
little disputes that seemed so unavoidable between us. She had, with the
help of Smithie, dressed rather elaborately for the occasion, and when
she saw me prepared to accompany her in, I think it was a grey suit,
she protested that silk hat and frock coat were imperative. I was
recalcitrant, she quoted an illustrated paper showing a garden party
with the King present, and finally I capitulated--but after my evil
habit, resentfully.... Eh, dear! those old quarrels, how pitiful they
were, how trivial! And how sorrowful they are to recall! I think they
grow more sorrowful as I grow older, and all the small passionate
reasons for our mutual anger fade and fade out of memory.

The impression that Beckenham company has left on my mind is one of
a modest unreality; they were all maintaining a front of unspecified
social pretension, and evading the display of the economic facts of the
case. Most of the husbands were "in business" off stage, it would have
been outrageous to ask what the business was--and the wives were
giving their energies to produce, with the assistance of novels and the
illustrated magazines, a moralised version of the afternoon life of the
aristocratic class. They hadn't the intellectual or moral enterprise
of the upper-class woman, they had no poli