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By Root 1957 0

her hope of respectable domesticity—and no one told her something might be missing from her calculations. She—alone of the Wellwood children—had played with dolls as a little girl, and she now imagined babies, clean, docile, smiling, holding out little rounded arms to be cuddled, some blonde, some dark, some boys, some girls. She would be the maker of a world with no shouting, no insecurity, no danger. When they went camping, she was in charge of the pots and pans and made delicious hotpots for everyone. By 1907 she was twenty-one and no one in any camp had clutched at her, or trailed her, let alone suggested they might marry. She knew the wrong people, she thought, and did not know where to find the right people. She was sandwiched between two sisters with too much initiative. Violet said the right young man would come along and notice her, but Violet was not in a position to introduce her to young men. Phyllis tried calmly to believe Violet.

Hedda in 1902 was thirteen. She resented being female. She thought she had been born to suffer injustice, and subordination, and that she would rebel. In 1903 Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters founded the WSPU, the suffragettes. Olive, like other successful women of her generation, had not involved herself in agitating for the Vote, although she accepted unreflectively that it was a “good thing,” better to have a Vote than not. Florence Cain attended meetings of the NUWSS and heard Millicent Garrett Fawcett speak. It was Hedda who, between 1903 and 1907, became more and more obsessed with suffrage, with opposition, with action, with revolt. She followed, eagerly, the campaign of the militants, as they broke glass and set bombs, were imprisoned, and later took to hunger-striking and suffered forcible feeding (1909). She occasionally hectored her mother and sisters. The rest of the time she brooded darkly. She would Act. In the beginning was the Act.

The person whose timetable, during the early years, was directed towards matchmaking was Griselda. She had promised her mother that in exchange for her time with Dorothy in Munich she would take part in the London Season of dances and house parties. Dutifully, she did. For her, 1902 was measured out in dressmakers’ and hairdressers’ appointments, balls and dances, country-house parties, tea-parties, lists of dancing-partners in tiny books with pretty covers hanging on gold and silver threads. She received two or three proposals of marriage—her pale and elegant good looks excited admiration—and protested calmly that she “did not know” these young men, that she could not imagine spending the rest of her life with them. There were many other young men who sensed a remoteness, a wilderness of ice, inside her, danced with her because she danced well, and proposed to other, funnier, warmer girls. Griselda invited Dorothy, with gentle desperation, to come to dances with her as she had gone to Munich, and Dorothy, grimly facing the reality of the timetable she had imposed on herself, said she could not. She could afford neither time nor money. She loved Griselda as much as ever, but she had a timetable. She said also that Griselda had said she meant to matriculate and study. Griselda said, maybe she would. Wait and see. She wasn’t as clever as Dorothy, she said, though both of them knew she was.

Julian Cain was at King’s College, Cambridge, where he discussed both the Higher and the Lower Sodomy with Gerald and others. In 1901 he had been an Apostolic “embryo,” invited to breakfasts and dinners, investigated to see if he had interesting or amusing ideas. In 1902 he went through the birthing ceremony on the famous hearthrug, received the essential anchovy toast, and became a full member of the secret Conversazione Society, or the Apostles. He gave a witty talk on the manifold uses made of museums by human beings, from cognoscenti and artists to tradesmen, policemen and naughty children, which was well received. The Apostles gently mocked German philosophy by referring to themselves as The World of Reality—everything else in the universe was only