ccess in charades. Everything was still very new to her,
everything interesting and amusing. She was enchanted with her house,
although Milly and Lady Thomson had chosen it, preferring to a villa in
the Parks an old gray house of the kind that are every day recklessly
destroyed by the march of modern vulgarity. She approved of the few and
good pieces of old furniture with which they had provided it; although
Lady Thomson could not entirely approve of the frivolity and
extravagance of the chintzes with which she helped the sunshine to
brighten the low, panelled rooms. But Aunt Beatrice, girt with
principles major and minor, armed with so Procrustean a measure for most
of her acquaintance, accepted Mildred's deviations with an astonishing
ease. The secret of personal magnetism is not yet discovered. It may be
that the _aura_ surrounding each of us is no mystic vision of the
Neo-Buddhists, but a physical fact; that Mildred's personality acted by
a power not moral but physical on the nerves of those who approached
her, exciting those of some, of the majority, pleasurably, filling
others with a nameless uneasiness, to account for which they must accuse
her manners or her character.

To Ian Stewart the old panelled house with the walled garden behind,
where snowdrops and crocuses pushed up under budding orchard boughs, was
a paradise beyond any he had imagined. He found Mildred the most
adorable of wives, the most interesting of companions. Her defects as a
housekeeper, which Aunt Beatrice noted in silence but with surprise,
were nothing to him. He could not help pausing sometimes even in the
midst of his work, to wonder at his own good fortune and to reflect
that whatever the future might have in store, he would have no right to
complain, since it had been given to him to know the taste of perfect
happiness.

Since his marriage he had been obliged to take more routine work, and
the Long Vacation had become more valuable to him than ever. As soon as
he had finished an Examination he had undertaken, he meant to devote the
time to the preparation of a new book which he had in his mind. Mildred,
seemingly as eager as himself that the book should be done, had at first
agreed. Then some of her numerous friends had described the pleasures of
Dieppe, and she was seized with the idea that they too might go there.
Ian, she said, could work as well at Dieppe as at Oxford or in the
country. Ian knew better; besides, his funds were low