tical interests, they had no
views about anything, and consequently they were, I remember, extremely
difficult to talk to. They all sat about in the summer-house and in
garden-chairs, and were very hatty and ruffley and sunshady. Three
ladies and the curate played croquet with a general immense gravity,
broken by occasional loud cries of feigned distress from the curate.
"Oh! Whacking me about again! Augh!"

The dominant social fact that afternoon was Mrs. Hogberry; she took up a
certain position commanding the croquet and went on, as my aunt said to
me in an incidental aside, "like an old Roundabout." She talked of the
way in which Beckenham society was getting mixed, and turned on to
a touching letter she had recently received from her former nurse at
Little Gossdean. Followed a loud account of Little Gossdean and how much
she and her eight sisters had been looked up to there. "My poor mother
was quite a little Queen there," she said. "And such NICE Common people!
People say the country labourers are getting disrespectful nowadays. It
isn't so--not if they're properly treated. Here of course in Beckenham
it's different. I won't call the people we get here a Poor--they're
certainly not a proper Poor. They're Masses. I always tell Mr. Bugshoot
they're Masses, and ought to be treated as such."...

Dim memories of Mrs. Mackridge floated through my mind as I listened to
her....

I was whirled on this roundabout for a bit, and then had the fortune to
fall off into a tete-a-tete with a lady whom my aunt introduced as
Mrs. Mumble--but then she introduced everybody to me as Mumble that
afternoon, either by way of humour or necessity.

That must have been one of my earliest essays in the art of polite
conversation, and I remember that I began by criticising the local
railway service, and that at the third sentence or thereabouts Mrs.
Mumble said in a distinctly bright and encouraging way that she feared I
was a very "frivolous" person.

I wonder now what it was I said that was "frivolous."

I don't know what happened to end that conversation, or if it had
an end. I remember talking to one of the clergy for a time rather
awkwardly, and being given a sort of topographical history of Beckenham,
which he assured me time after time was "Quite an old place. Quite an
old place." As though I had treated it as new and he meant to be very
patient but very convincing. Then we hung up in a distinct pause, and my
aunt rescued me. "Ge