the dogs!"

CHAPTER VII

"Three more invitations!--since lunch," said Mrs. Hooper, as she came
into the schoolroom, where her elder daughter sat by the window
renovating a garden hat.

Her mother dropped the envelopes on a small table beside Alice, and
sitting down on the other side of it, she waited for her
daughter's comments.

Alice threw down her work, and hastily opened the notes. She flushed an
angry pink as she read them.

"I might as well not exist!" she said shortly, as she pushed them away
again.

For two of the notes requested the pleasure of Dr. and Mrs. Hooper's and
Lady Constance Bledlow's company at dinner, and the third, from a very
great lady, begged "dear Mrs. Hooper" to bring Lady Constance to a small
party in Wolsey College Gardens, to meet the Chancellor of the
University, a famous Tory peer, who was coming down to a public,
meeting. In none of the three was there any mention of the elder
Miss Hooper.

Mrs. Hooper looked worried. It was to her credit that her maternal
feeling, which was her only passion, was more irritated by this sudden
stream of invitations than her vanity was tickled.

What was there indeed to tickle anybody's vanity in the situation? It
was all Constance--Constance--Constance! Mrs. Hooper was sometimes sick
of the very name "Lady Constance Bledlow," It had begun to get on her
nerves. The only defence against any sort of "superiority," as some one
has said, is to love it. But Mrs. Hooper did not love her husband's
niece. She was often inclined to wish, as she caught sight of Alice's
pinched face, that the household had never seen her. And yet without
Connie's three hundred a year, where would the household be!

Mrs. Hooper was painfully, one might have said, guiltily aware of that
side of the business. She was an incompetent, muddling woman, who had
never learnt to practise the simple and dignified thrift so common in
the academic households of the University. For nowhere, really, was
plain living gayer or more attractive than in the new Oxford of this
date. The young mothers who wheeled their own perambulators in the
Parks, who bathed and dressed and taught their children, whose
house-books showed a spirited and inventive economy of which they were
inordinately proud, who made their own gowns of Liberty stuff in scorn
of the fashion, were at the same time excellent hostesses, keeping open
house on Sundays for their husbands' undergraduate pupils, and gallantly
e