‘Mother was happy when she had me, so that’s why I’m a happier person than Harry and Francis, and so I’ve got to look after them. They haven’t had a fair chance,’ she decided, when she was about twelve years old.

She took a natural delight in beauty and order. This is one of the finest gifts which a human being can possess; next to the gift of faith, it bestows more joy on its possessor than any other. Sophia accepted the existence of vice without a feeling of horror, but it bored and annoyed her because it usually upset order and spoiled beauty.

This calm acceptance of the ugliness of life, and a painful nervous instability, were the worst results which environment and heredity had so far produced in the young Gardens. It was surprising, in the circumstances, that all three were not much nastier than they were; but the good qualities which they had inherited from their mother helped them to be courageous and to find laughter where one would least expect it to be; and on the whole, Sophia and Harry and Francis were likable.

But while there is life there is always hope; and Aunt Maxine, Uncle Preston and the rest of the relatives did not despair (though of course they all said how dreadful it would be if it happened) of seeing poor Hartley’s children go to the dogs as poor Hartley had done. These indiscreet prophecies fostered the natural dislike which the children felt for their relations, but also made them determined, in a bored sort of way, not to go to the dogs as your poor father did.

The elder Gardens were always prophesying woe, woe. They dearly loved a bit of excitement, but they disapproved of the usual healthy means of obtaining it, and were therefore compelled to fall back on family rows, dramatizing their emotions, deploring the probable fates of Sophia, Harry and Francis, and woe, woe-ing; and, heaven knows, there was usually something to woe, woe about, for the family came of an unusually passionate and vital stock, born to rows and trouble.

Old Acton Garden, who died three years before the children’s father, had been a violent Irishman, a doctor who had married his gentle first cousin Mary, and fathered three boys and a girl – Oliver, Hartley, Preston and Maxine.

His strong passions had been held in check, not by reason, but by forces which have come to be called ‘typically Victorian,’ though it is doubtful whether they are so. He bound his demons down with chains of fear, respect for convention, and his deep, inborn sense of the wickedness of the instincts. A violent love of beauty in all its forms dwelled in him side by side with this sense of guilt; he was particularly moved by the loveliness of women and by the power of music.

He suffered considerably from this deep conflict in his spirit, and so did his two elder children, Oliver and Hartley. Their sufferings looked out from their eyes, the large bright grey-blue Garden eyes, which in Hartley were lightened to the green of the sea on an April evening; and the natures of both brothers were so twisted, difficult and unhappy that their father never ceased to thank Providence that Maxine and Preston, though they were nervous and moody enough, were not quite so impossible as Hartley and Oliver.