On the Sunday after Dr. McAllister left, Miss Pride came to my house, catching me, to my consternation, reading the comic strips instead of, as we would have both preferred, finding me ensconced behind the last issue of The Atlantic Monthly or Mr. Emerson’s Self Reliance. I had been lying on the floor, moreover, on my belly and had been breakfasting, as I read, on a banana and a jellied doughnut. When I sprang to my feet at the sight of her standing primly at my kitchen door, I put the inflated doughnut, oozing out its raspberry heart, on the shelf amongst the pipes and tools and empty jars. My guest had never been in the house before (or anything like it, I suspected) and as we talked, she examined everything, not overlooking the remains of my disgraceful meal, with extreme care as if she were trying to find one object less dreadful than the rest. With a candor that was both brutal and complimentary, since it assumed that my taste was akin to her own, she asked me if I did not find the two pictures above the table appalling. I agreed and she said, “I knew you wouldn’t mind my speaking plainly. It is one of the privileges of age.” Now I had some years before acquired an animadversion to the little girls and the springer spaniels and to the barnyard and, because I idealized him, I could not imagine what had possessed my father to buy them. But I concealed the identity of their purchaser by saying, “They were in the house when my father came. He always hated them but my mother was fond of them.” She ignored this false and cowardly aspersion on my mother and stated the purpose of her visit.

“I thought, since Sunday is not one of my motoring days, that perhaps I could lend you Mac and my car for your trips. I told Dr. McAllister that he was rude not to warn me sooner that he was leaving. It only occurred to me this morning when I was served by the substitute waitress. I had forgotten it was Sunday.”

I thanked her, not without noting privately that she herself was leaving Chichester a week from today. But she went on, “And something else came to my mind at the same time. Perhaps I mentioned the memoirs I hope to write this winter? And didn’t I tell you I needed a secretary to do the ‘dirty work’? I know you haven’t the qualifications but after all you could go to a school of some sort to learn, couldn’t you? The fact is that my niece who, as you know, has been living with me, is going to New York for the winter and I shall quite rattle about by myself in my house. I would like to offer you your lodgings as well as the trifling gift of your tuition. Would you be interested?”