It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is
celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and
soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure
her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed,
and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her
half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years
later, for a journey to Italy.
Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of
them had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-
father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the
moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence,
equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from
sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy
there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome. They returned,
if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months
or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem,
in health again and consciously a very civilised person.
New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant
flowers-daffodils were particularly good that year-and Mrs. Seddon
celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short
notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the
garden if the weather held.
The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of
comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had
been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich
blossoming cherry and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of
nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely
mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse
into lawn or glade. And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above
her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our
rather too consciously dressed party,-we had come in the motor four
strong, with my aunt in grey silk. Margaret wore a soft flowing
flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the
fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful
Primavera.
It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer,
and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures
and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and
garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house
with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea
drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs.
Seddon had planned.
The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate
with a large head, a good voice and a radiant manner, who was
obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands
still sufficiently addicted to their wives to accompany them. One
of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond
curly hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a
refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie
of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes,
and presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. There
were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. There was also one
father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old
school scarcely half broken in, reluctant, rebellious and
consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters
were all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the undesirable
humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very
gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were mainly mothers
with daughters-daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts,
and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and
regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think,
all the time, though not formally absent.
Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows,
where four trim maids went to and fro busily between the house and
the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and
croquet were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of
rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high spring.
Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted
and partly talked to me and my cousin Sibyl-Gertrude had found a
disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a
state of gentle revival-while their mother exercised a divided
chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate,
stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and
preluded, I remember, every observation he made by a vigorous
resumption of stirring.
We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was
a Selwyn man and had taken a pass degree in theology, but Margaret
had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her
breakdown, and understood these differences. She had the eagerness
of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and
personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic
about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and the curate, addressing
himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story
illustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure-
minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on