Garden parties, tennis tournaments, the Napworth cricket week, claimed
Damaris' attendance in turn, along with agreeable display of her foreign
spoils in the matter of Paris hats and frocks. Proofs arrived in big
envelopes perpetually by post; first in the long, wide-margined galley
form, later in the more dignified one of quire and numbered page. The
crude, sour smell of damp paper and fresh printer's ink, for the first
time assailed our maiden's nostrils. It wasn't nice; yet she sniffed it
with a quaint sense of pleasure. For was it not part of the whole
wonderful, beautiful business of the making of books? To the artist the
meanest materials of his art have a sacredness not to be denied or
ignored. They go to forward the birth of the precious whole, and hence
are redeemed, for him, from all charge of common or uncleanness.

Finally Miss Felicia, arriving in mid-June, paid an unending visit, of
which Damaris felt no impatience. Miss Felicia during the last two years
had, indeed, become a habit. The major affairs of life it might be both
useless and unwise to submit to her judgment. She lost her way in them,
fluttering ineffectual, gently hurried and bird-like. But, in life's
minor affairs, her innocent enthusiasm was invaluable as an encouraging
asset. It lent point and interest to happenings and occupations otherwise
trivial or monotonous. If silly at times, she never was
stupid--distinction of meaning and moment.--A blameless creature,
incapable of thinking, still more of speaking, evil of the worst or
weakest, her inherent goodness washed about you like sun-warmed water, if
sterile yet translucently pure.

And so the months accumulated. The clear colours of spring ripened to the
hotter gamut of mid-summer, to an August splendour of ripening harvest in
field, orchard and hedgerow, and thence to the purple, russet and gold of
autumn. The birds, their nesting finished, ceased from song, as the
active care of hungry fledglings grew on them. The swallows had gathered
for their southern flight, and the water-fowl returned from their
northern immigration to the waters and reed-beds of the Haven, Sir
Charles Verity's book, in two handsome quarto volumes, had been duly
reviewed and found a place of honour in every library, worth the name, in
the United Kingdom, before anything of serious importance occurred
directly affecting our maiden. Throughout spring, summer and the first
weeks of autumn, she marked time merely. Her a