You'd think Mary Crosshampton would know better than to let her daughter
go flourishing the family imagination about in that way."

"Eleanor told you?"

"By way of showing that they think of--things in general."

The bishop reflected. "She wants to go to College."

"They want to go in a set."

"I wonder if college can be much worse than school.... She's eighteen--?
But I will talk to her...."

(10)


All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.

The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.

He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in
his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
hand holding her sprained wrist.