Containing Thoughts upon the Great Unknown, to which are added Speculations upon her Hereafter

It is not often that I find the time to take part in Mrs Albert Grundy’s Thursdays—the third and fifth Thursdays of each month, from 4 to 6.30 P.M.—but on a certain afternoon pleasant weather and the sense of long-accrued responsibility drew me to Fernbank.

It was really very nice, after one got there. Perhaps it would have been less satisfactory had escape from the drawing-room been a more difficult matter. Inside that formal chamber, with its blinds down-drawn to shield the carpet from the sun, the respectable air hung somewhat heavily about the assembled matronhood of Brompton and the Kensingtons. The units in this gathering changed from time to time—for Mrs Albert’s circle is a large and growing one—but the effect of the sum remained much the same. The elderly ladies talked about the amiability and kindliness of the Duchess of Teck; and argued the Continental relationships of the Duchesses of Connaught and Albany, first into an apparently hopeless tangle of burgs and hausens and zollerns and sweigs, then triumphantly out again into the bright daylight of well-ordered and pellucid genealogy. The younger wives spoke in subdued voices of more juvenile Princesses on the lower steps of the throne, with occasional short-winged flights across the North Sea in imaginative search of a suitable bride for the then unwedded Duke of York, if an importation should be found to be necessary—about which opinions might in all loyalty differ. The few young girls who sat dutifully here beside their mammas or married sisters talked of nothing at all, but smiled confusedly and looked away whenever another’s glance, caught theirs—and, I daresay, thought with decent humility upon Marchionesses.

But outside, on the garden-lawn at the rear of the house, the Almanach de Gotha threw no shadow, and the pungent scent of jasmine and lilies drove the leathery odour of Debrett from the soft summer air. The gentle London haze made Whistlers and Maitlands of the walls and roof-lines and chimney-pots beyond. The pretty girls of Fernbank held court here on the velvet grass, with groups of attendant maidens from sympathetic Myrtle Lodges and Cedarcrofts and Chestnut Villas—selected homesteads stretching all the way to remote West Kensington. They said there was no one left in London. Why, as I sat apart in the shade of the ivy overhanging the garden path, and watched this out-door panorama of the Grundys’ friendships, it seemed as if I had never comprehended before how many girls there really were in the world.

And how sweet it was to look upon these damsels, with their dainty sailor’s hats of straw, their cheeks of Devon cream and damask, their tall and shapely forms, their profiles of faultless classical delicacy! What if, in time, they too must sit inside, by preference, and babble of royalties and the peerage, and politely uncover those two aggressive incisors of genteel maturity when they were asked to have a third cup of tea? That stage, praise heaven, should be many years removed. We will have no memento mori bones or tusks out here in the sunlit garden—but only tennis balls, and the inspiring chalk-bands on the sward, and the noble grace of English girlhood, erect and joyous in the open air. # Much as I delighted in this spectacle, it forced upon me as well a certain vague sense of depression. These lofty and lovely creatures were strangers to me. I do not mean that their names were unknown to me, or that I had not exchanged civil words with many of them, or that I might not be presented to, and affably received by, them all. The feeling was, rather, that if it were possible for me to marry them all, we still to the end of our days would remain strangers. I should never know what to say to them; still less should I ever be able to guess what they were thinking.

The tallest and most impressive of all the bevy—the handsome girl in the pale brown frock with the shirt-front and jacketed blouse, who stands leaning with folded hands upon her racket like an indolent Diana—why, I punted her about the whole reach from Sunbury to Walton during the better part of a week, only last summer, not to mention sitting ............