ness ... your attitude to life will cease to be commercial and
become artistic. Then the guardian at the gate, scrutinising and sorting
the incoming impressions, will no longer ask, "What use is this to
_me?_"... You see things at last as the artist does, for their sake, not
for your own.'--EVELYN UNDERHILL.

CONTENTS

PART I.--TOLD BY R.M.

I. POTTERS
II. ANTI-POTTERS
III. OPPORTUNITY
IV. JANE AND CLARE

PART II.--TOLD BY GIDEON

I. SPINNING
II. DINING WITH THE HOBARTS
III. SEEING JANE

PART III.--TOLD BY LELIA YORKE

I. THE TERRIBLE TRAGEDY ON THE STAIRS
II. AN AWFUL SUSPICION

PART IV.--TOLD BY KATHERINE VARICK

A BRANCH OF STUDY

PART V.--TOLD BY JUKE

GIVING ADVICE

PART VI.--TOLD BY R.M.

I. THE END OF A POTTER MELODRAMA
II. ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED
III. THE PRECISIAN AT WAR WITH THE WORLD
IV. RUNNING AWAY
V. A PLACARD FOR THE PRESS

PART I:

TOLD BY R.M.

CHAPTER I

POTTERS

1

Johnny and Jane Potter, being twins, went through Oxford together. Johnny
came up from Rugby and Jane from Roedean. Johnny was at Balliol and Jane
at Somerville. Both, having ambitions for literary careers, took the
Honours School of English Language and Literature. They were ordinary
enough young people; clever without being brilliant, nice-looking without
being handsome, active without being athletic, keen without being
earnest, popular without being leaders, open-handed without being
generous, as revolutionary, as selfish, and as intellectually snobbish as
was proper to their years, and inclined to be jealous one of the other,
but linked together by common tastes and by a deep and bitter distaste
for their father's newspapers, which were many, and for their mother's
novels, which were more. These were, indeed, not fit for perusal at
Somerville and Balliol. The danger had been that Somerville and Balliol,
till they knew you well, should not know you knew it.

In their first year, the mother of Johnny and Jane ('Leila Yorke,' with
'Mrs. Potter' in brackets after it), had, after spending Eights Week at
Oxford, announced her intention of writing an Oxford novel. Oh God, Jane
had cried within herself, not that; anything but that; and firmly she
and Johnny had told her mother that already there were _Keddy_, and
_Sinister Street_, and _The Pearl_, and _The Girls of St. Ursula's_ (by
Annie S. Swan: 'After the races were over, the girls sculled th