Father had retired that winter from his professorship in London, in order to write a book about prehistoric England and those of its highly controversial inhabitants who were responsible for the long barrows, and the mysterious half-obliterated hilltop camps, and the stone circles. The Mendip Hills and surrounding country abound in barrows and stones and ancient mines and encampments, and Father’s intention was to live amongst them while he wrote, making excursions by car to neighboring sites when he felt like it, or when the weather was particularly fine, or his desk work palled, or his womenfolk obtruded themselves too much on his notice. Having been without a wife ever since Sabrina was born, Father was not well broken in as regards womenfolk. Aunt Effie and Sabrina bored him, and kept out of his way as much as possible, which only spoilt him and made him the more incompetent to deal with such domestic situations as arose from time to time. But Aunt Effie, who had never been married, believed that all men were pretty much alike. Unless, of course, they were Rakes, she would add. Father wasn’t a Rake.

Sabrina’s ideas of life were necessarily, in these circumstances, rather constricted, and her experience, compared to that of most girls of her enlightened generation, was calamitously small. Once she had been sent to a fashionable school in Sussex; a very good school, which Aunt Effie chose by an obscure mental process similar to flipping a coin. The fees were high, the personnel prepossessing, the location healthful and picturesque, and the daily régime quite the thing in girls’ schools.

To Sabrina, an only child accustomed either to solitude or to adult society, it was a captivity full of horror. She had to sleep in a room with five other narrow, spartan beds in it, and wash at one of a row of six basins and jugs exactly alike—baths twice a week. The room was lighted after dark by two electric bulbs in white glass shades hung high from the ceiling. She ate at a table for ten among forty-nine other girls. The puddings were heavy, the vegetables were watery, and the lamb was always mutton. In the dining-room the same white light beat down nakedly from above. The pitiless ventilation came from open windows. Strenuous exercise was as inevitable daily as mathematics. Sweets, even if brought from home, were collected by the matron and doled out again on Sundays. Letter-writing was scheduled for two days a week; on other days you had to ask permission to write a letter. If you brought books back with you from holidays at home, they had to be submitted to the Principal. Bells rang all the time, and each one meant you had to stop what you were doing and begin to do something else.