still had reason to believe in permanency and had indeed many of
them--sometimes through ingenuousness, sometimes through stupidity
of type--acquired a singular confidence in the importance and
stability of their possessions, desires, ambitions and forms of
conviction.

London at the time, in common with other great capitals, felt
itself rather final though priding itself on being much more fluid
and adaptable than it had been fifty years previously. In speaking
of itself it at least dealt with fixed customs, and conditions
and established facts connected with them--which gave rise to
brilliant--or dull--witticisms.

One of these, heard not infrequently, was to the effect that--in
London--one might live under an umbrella if one lived under it in
the right neighbourhood and on the right side of the street, which
axiom is the reason that a certain child through the first six
years of her life sat on certain days staring out of a window
in a small, dingy room on the top floor of a slice of a house on
a narrow but highly fashionable London street and looked on at
the passing of motors, carriages and people in the dull afternoon
grayness.

The room was exalted above its station by being called The Day
Nursery and another room equally dingy and uninviting was known as
The Night Nursery. The slice of a house was inhabited by the very
pretty Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, its inordinate rent being reluctantly
paid by her--apparently with the assistance of those "ravens" who
are expected to supply the truly deserving. The rent was inordinate
only from the standpoint of one regarding it soberly in connection