k
cashmere in the afternoon, and black silk in the evening. She was
methodical, and professed a hatred of all nonsense. She liked to take
care of everything and to avoid using it. Also, though fundamentally
kind-hearted, she was firm even to the point of obstinacy. Her ideas
were old-fashioned, and she had only hatred and contempt for any other
ideas. She kept fowls and understood them completely. She also kept her
orphan niece, Ruth Caterham, and understood her less completely.
Indisputably she loved the fowls much less than she loved her niece, but
the fowls had comparatively the greater liberty. She maintained a
decent, upper-middle-class state in a Georgian house, on the confines of
a little town that thoroughly respected her. It was not a suburb. It was
too far from London for that. The best trains took forty minutes. Miss
Caterham was rather acidulated about suburban people.

There, from time to time, she entertained the brother of Ruth's deceased
mother. She loved him, and abhorred his opinions. So far as might be,
she kept him in order. His name was George Maniways, and he was in
Parliament, and his politics were of the wrong colour. "You and the
other enemies of England," Miss Caterham would say, in addressing him.
She would probably have quarrelled with him, frequently, but for the
fact that it takes two to make a quarrel, and Mr Maniways was too lazy
to play up properly. His temper was so good as to be almost
pusillanimous. He was almost the only male who ever entered her house,
except in a menial capacity. She had been compelled to allow Ruth to
accept the Sotherings' dance and Lady Rochisen's. But when young Bruce
Sothering wrote to ask if he might call, she replied that they were just
going away, but that she would write on her return. She did not write on
her return. And she cannot have forgotten it, for Ruth reminded her
twice. Rather a difficult woman, Miss Caterham.

The day being hot, George had arrayed his long and meagre body in white
flannel. The conformation of his large grey moustache and his apologetic
blue eyes gave him the appearance of rather a meek kind of walrus--one
that would feed from the hand and do trust-and-paid-for. He reposed
himself after luncheon in a large deck-chair on the veranda. He held
between his teeth an amber tube with a cigarette in it. He had a box of
matches in one hand, and intended to light the cigarette when he felt
more rested. In the meantime he nursed a straw ha