I had met her in September. The house my father lived in is about twelve miles away from your mother's home at Ridinghanger, and I was taken over by Percy Restall in his motor-car. Restall had just become a convert to this new mode of , and he was very active with a huge, malignant-looking French car that opened behind, and had a kind of and all sorts of features that have since disappeared from the world. He took everyone that he could lay hands upon for rides,—he called it extending their range, and he called upon everyone else to show off the car; he was responsible for more introduction and social admixture in that part of Surrey than had occurred during the previous century. We in the Ridinghanger drive, Restall did his own repairs, and so it was we stayed for nearly four hours and instead of a caller I became a familiar friend of the family.
Your mother then was still not eighteen, a soft white slip of being, tall, slender, brown-haired and silent, with very still deep dark eyes. She and your three aunts formed a very gracious group of young women indeed; Alice then as now the most , with a gay initiative and a fluent tongue; Molly already a sun-brown gipsy, and Norah still a pig-tailed thing of legs and wild embraces and the pinkest of swift pink blushes; your uncle Sidney, with his shy lank , acted the brotherly part of a foil. There were several stray visitors, young men and , there were always stray visitors in those days at Ridinghanger, and your grandmother, and bright-eyed, maintained a gentle flow of creature comforts and but humorous observations. I do not remember your grandfather on this occasion; probably he wasn't there.
There was tea, and we played tennis and walked about and occasionally visited Restall, who was getting dirtier and dirtier, and crosser and crosser at his repairs, and spreading a continually more assemblage of parts and instruments over the grass about him. He looked at last more like a pitch in the Caledonian market than a decent country gentleman paying an afternoon call. And then back to more tennis and more talk. We fell into a discussion of Reform as we sat taking tea. Two of the visitor youths were strongly infected by the new teachings which were overshadowing the outlook of British . Some mean phrase about not conquering Africa for the German bagman, some ugly turn of thought that at a touch brought down Empire to the level of a tradesman's advantage, fell from one of them, and stirred me to sudden indignation. I began to talk of things that had been in my mind for some time.
I do not know what I said. It was in the
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