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By Root 2118 0

were quasi-paternal. Imogen wore a long hooded cloak, held together with two beaten silver clasps which he thought were very ugly. The hood would not stay over her head, and the whole garment blew and flapped in the wind coming off the sea. When the hood was down, her hair blew about too. It was caught up in theory, by a plaited strand which held it in a mane behind her head, but the whole thing, he thought, was a dreadful mess. She should see a hairdresser. She should have a hat with some style to it. She looked downwards, with cast-down lashes, at her serviceable but very worn boots, and reached, with hands draped in fingerless lacy mittens, to hold down the blown bits of her clothing. She had, he thought, a very sweet face, an innocent face, that should not have had the quality of lifelessness he perceived in it.

“I wanted to catch you by yourself, which has proved difficult. I have an idea I should like to put to you.”

“I don’t think—”

“Please, hear me out, before you refuse me.” That sounded very like a suitor. She went on looking down.

He put his plan to her. He explained that after the period of apprenticeship, and learning the ropes, she could take the entrance exam, and become a craftswoman, or a teacher, as she chose.

“Why?” she said. “Why are you doing this for me?”

“I don’t like waste. And you have talent.”

“There are all sorts of reasons,” she said into the wind and the spray, “why this can’t happen. It can’t.”

“Would you like it, if it could?”

She bowed her head. The hood flopped forward.

“I shall speak to your father. Today.”

“You can’t. I mustn’t… they need me, Mother and Father, Pomona …”

“And what do you need? Your brother hasn’t felt he must stay here.”

Geraint had indeed taken himself off to the counting rooms and telegrams of the City of London, where he was rapidly becoming successful in Basil Wellwood’s bank.

“I believe I have some influence with your father. I shall convince him you will be safe, for I shall invite you to stay with myself and Florence, whilst you learn the ways of the college. How can he object?”

“You don’t understand—” said Imogen, dully. He stopped, and took her by the shoulders, and looked into her face.

“No, I don’t understand everything. But I believe I understand enough to put a case to your father.”

And then, suddenly, she flung herself into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. He could not hear what she was saying, nervously and rapidly, into his jacket, but he held her, and patted her back, and felt her sob between his hands.

He approached Benedict Fludd himself with an anxiety he concealed completely. He went to see Fludd in his study—the room that had once been a scullery, and was now full of drying pots and drawing pads, in the midst of which was a Morris & Co. Sussex armchair, in which Fludd was sitting. He said

“I have something I want to say to you—a proposal I want to put you. About Imogen.”

Again, that lurking, parodic sense of being a suitor.

“What about Imogen?” said Fludd, ungraciously. Prosper Cain said that he had been impressed by Imogen’s talent, and explained his plan for her immediate fortune.

“She’s very well where she is,” said Fludd.

“She’s lonely and unemployed,” said Cain.

“Her family needs her, I need her.”

“You have Philip Warren and the inestimable Elsie. You have your wife and Pomona. I think it is time to give Imogen her freedom.”

“Ha! You think I imprison her.”

“No. But I think it is time for her to leave.”

“You are an interfering pompous military bastard. And you know, none better, that there’s no money to pay for her keep in the filthy city.”

“I propose that she lives with me as a visitor until—as I believe she can and should—she wins a scholarship to the Royal College. And then she will be enabled to earn her own keep. If she doesn’t marry. She doesn’t meet many young men, here.”

“You believe I don’t know what my duty is? And her duty is to care for her parents.”

“Not now, not yet, however you look at it. Old friend, you are behaving like a tyrannical father in a story. I know you better than that. I