He knew that his life was horrible, but it never seemed quite real to him. He never grew into an adult with a man’s mature realization of the awful brevity of life, and the necessity for shaping it.

He always had, in the depths of his suffering spirit, a belief that suddenly, without effort, the enormous load of work, misery, frustration and drink would roll away; and leave him happy, in a clear radiant world filled with the sound of Wagner’s music and the smell and colour of dark red carnations, which were to him the symbols of perfect beauty.

Mrs Garden shared this belief. He felt it as a bound Titan; she felt it as a miserable but brave child. Neither of them was capable, however, of working to secure this world of which they dreamed, and both died in the full tide of mingled misery and secret, irrational hope.

Mrs Garden was forty-eight when she died, and her husband was eight years older. He only lived for six months after her death; and during that time he changed.

Perhaps her death wounded his spirit in some secret place which had been untouched by his other women, or perhaps he felt that his youth had died with her. Whatever it was, he changed. Though he did not stop drinking, he became gentle and quiet, and when heart failure killed him one evening in three minutes, in the interval between seeing two patients, all his relatives and women felt that he had been cheated out of a last, and a genuine, repentance.

Sophia did not feel this. She decided that six months of pensive grief did not atone for more than twenty years of bullying and unfaithfulness and cruelty, and that was why she was not sorry (so she grimly told herself) that her father was dead.

But when she was older, and growing wiser, she would sometimes meet at a dinner party a distinguished elderly throat specialist or a surgeon, who would stare at her as though he had been introduced to a ghost and say at last: ‘Surely you must be Hartley Garden’s daughter?’ And then, after a pause filled with vivid thoughts, ‘You’re very like him … I was up at Bailey’s with him, you know. Very like … yes, he was a brilliant man, your father. He ought to have been in Harley Street with his gifts, but he didn’t take care of himself. A great pity. Yes … it’s a really astonishing likeness. You might almost be Hartley, looking at me.’

And Sophia, who no longer resented her likeness to her father, would add a little to the pity for him and the understanding of his nature which had begun to grow in her heart.

But for many years she could not forgive him for the way in which he had allowed his three children to grow up.

He would not send them to school because he thought that this would make them ‘ordinary,’ and he despised ordinary people. He was proud of their strongly marked personalities and their precociousness, and he wanted to develop these qualities under his own eye.