eyes, it was inextricably your destiny. Above you were your betters,
below you were your inferiors, and there were even an unstable
questionable few, cases so disputable that you might for the rough
purposes of every day at least, regard them as your equals. Head
and centre of our system was Lady Drew, her "leddyship," shrivelled,
garrulous, with a wonderful memory for genealogies and very, very
old, and beside her and nearly as old, Miss Somerville, her cousin and
companion. These two old souls lived like dried-up kernels in the great
shell of Bladesover House, the shell that had once been gaily full of
fops, of fine ladies in powder and patches and courtly gentlemen with
swords; and when there was no company they spent whole days in the
corner parlour just over the housekeeper's room, between reading and
slumber and caressing their two pet dogs. When I was a boy I used always
to think of these two poor old creatures as superior beings living, like
God, somewhere through the ceiling. Occasionally they bumped about a bit
and one even heard them overhead, which gave them a greater effect of
reality without mitigating their vertical predominance. Sometimes too I
saw them. Of course if I came upon them in the park or in the shrubbery
(where I was a trespasser) I hid or fled in pious horror, but I was
upon due occasion taken into the Presence by request. I remember
her "leddyship" then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain,
a quavering injunction to me to be a good boy, a very shrunken
loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy hand that trembled a halfcrown
into mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind, a paler thing of broken
lavender and white and black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes.
Her hair was yellow and her colour bright, and when we sat in the
housekeeper's room of a winter's night warming our toes and sipping
elder wine, her maid would tell us the simple secrets of that belated
flush.... After my fight with young Garvell I was of course banished,
and I never saw those poor old painted goddesses again.