Whether Miss Pride appreciated my pen-wiper or whether she compared me, to my advantage, to her niece, I could not tell, but at any rate, she was increasingly cordial to me that summer. She sent me on errands to her room when she was waiting for Mac or settling down to her reading in the lobby. “Run upstairs and bring me a handkerchief, my dear,” she would say, and the “my dear” or “my good child” made me think my case was not an altogether hopeless one. And when she left in September, she gave me a sealing wax kit in token of her approval of the way I made her bed. The wax was rather old and did not go on smoothly and the “S” of the seal was backwards. But I did not care. On the fly-leaf of each of my school books I dripped the blood-red taper and impressed my initials in the molten mound. So that just as each time Miss Pride wiped her pen she remembered me, I remembered her whenever I opened a book.

3

My brother Ivan would have granted my mother’s wish and died soon after his birth if it had not been for the constant ministrations of Mrs. Henderson, who was both a generous and a sharp-eyed woman. If her attitude had been preponderantly the first when the baby was born, it was the second that for five winters and summers kept her in daily communication with our household. For she was one of those people we call “good.” There was in her not the impulse to intrude, but to embrace, not to scatter kindness but to mend with it, and to do so not in the light of this or that principle, but because love was her nature. Mrs. Henderson’s reputation was widespread in Chichester and had even reached the Hotel Barstow. Once, in the third summer of Ivan’s life, I heard Mrs. Prather saying to a young relative, “I’m far more tolerant of the Catholics than most of my friends, but I can’t agree with them that everyone must go through Purgatory—oh, I shall, I’m a sinner, but I’ve known people so pure I’m certain it’s the good Lord’s intention they should go straight to Heaven.”

The girl looked doubtful. “I don’t believe you do know such a person—at any rate it can’t be anyone I’ve ever seen in your house.”

“No, she has never been in my house. But you know her if you’ve ever had any sewing or mending done when you’ve visited here. I mean Mrs. Henderson who lives on this road up about a quarter of a mile.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve been there. But how do you know? Surely you haven’t struck up a friendship with her!”

“There was no need. Her goodness is as plain as the nose on your face.” And she went on to describe the serene household, equipped with children whose manners imitated their mother’s and with a husband who, whatever he might be outside the house, behaved in that atmosphere as commendably as one of his own children.