perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or such-like gage. She kept her
wedding-ring, of course, but all the others she destroyed. She never
told me his christian name or indeed spoke a word to me of him; though
at times I came near daring to ask her: add what I have of him--it isn't
much--I got from his brother, my hero, my uncle Ponderevo. She wore her
ring; her marriage certificate she kept in a sealed envelope in the very
bottom of her largest trunk, and me she sustained at a private
school among the Kentish hills. You must not think I was always at
Bladesover--even in my holidays. If at the time these came round, Lady
Drew was vexed by recent Company, or for any other reason wished to take
it out of my mother, then she used to ignore the customary reminder my
mother gave her, and I "stayed on" at the school.

But such occasions were rare, and I suppose that between ten and
fourteen I averaged fifty days a year at Bladesover.

Don't imagine I deny that was a fine thing for me. Bladesover, in
absorbing the whole countryside, had not altogether missed greatness.
The Bladesover system has at least done one good thing for England, it
has abolished the peasant habit of mind. If many of us still live and
breathe pantry and housekeeper's room, we are quit of the dream of
living by economising parasitically on hens and pigs.... About that park
there were some elements of a liberal education; there was a great space
of greensward not given over to manure and food grubbing; there was
mystery, there was matter for the imagination. It was still a park of
deer. I saw something of the life of these dappled creatures, heard the
belling of stags, came upon young fawns among the bracken, found bones,
skulls, and antlers in lonely places. There were corners that gave
a gleam of meaning to the word forest, glimpses of unstudied natural
splendour. There was a slope of bluebells in the broken sunlight under