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By Root 1941 0

by seducing a female student from the LSE after a meeting on women’s rights.) He watched her behaviour, when she came home. She spoke to him in public, drily, practically, much as she always had. He wondered whether she would ever allow him to speak to her in private again. Then, one day, she came to him, in his study—it was the summer of 1902, and she had sat some of her exams for matriculation, and was preparing others for the end of the year. The tutors were organising a reading party in a cottage in the New Forest, a romantic cottage, in a clearing in the trees, with a river running past. Dorothy said she was going, with Tom and Griselda and Charles, to read there—and Julian and Florence would come, and Geraint and maybe the Fludd girls. She said

“And my father is coming to stay with August Steyning, and his sons are coming with him, and I think it would be fun to invite them to the camp. Wolfgang and Leon, that is.”

Humphry dared not ask any questions. He murmured, awkwardly, “That’s good, that’s good.” Then, lightly, “What do they know?”

“As much as they need to know. We don’t really talk about it. But I like them. Very much. And they like me.”

“Well, that’s good. No harm done?”

Dorothy hesitated. Both of them remembered the urgently fumbling hands, the blood. Humphry wanted to say, please don’t set one mad moment against a lifetime—well, your lifetime—of love. He stared at the floor. Dorothy said, judiciously,

“Not no harm, no. But it is all right. You are my father, that’s a fact.”

It was a warning, as well as a concession.

“I do love you,” said Humphry, entering the forbidden ground. And Dorothy was able to say, lightly, practically, apparently easily, “I love you too. Always did.”

Humphry put his arms briefly round her, and kissed the top of her head, as he had done when she was a little girl. And she kissed the side of his beard, lightly, lightly, as she had done as a little girl.

During these years Prosper Cain was preoccupied with the slowly rising, dangerous, dust-clouded new building, draped in a network of scaffolding, muffled, and mysterious. Under the scaffolding domes, pinnacles and a central crowned tower came into being. Inside the building there was dissension between those concerned primarily with the beauty of the objects to be displayed, and those concerned with their utility as teaching aids for craftsmen. There was a movement on the Continent to construct or reconstruct rooms and settings—panelled, or with stone pillars and lancet windows, in which beds, tables, chairs, carpets and ceramics could be seen as the museum designers imagined their makers might have seen them. In Munich the Bavarian National Museum was newly built to show—on its façade—every period and style of architecture—and inside rooms with ceilings, floors and pillars expressly designed to show off a collection of church furnishings, or a lady’s boudoir. Photographs of these splendours were published in 1901, and the Emperor of Prussia expressed approval and delight.

Prosper Cain had failed to save the strange and lovely furniture, bought by one of the jurors at the Paris Exhibition and donated to the Museum. It had been banished to Bethnal Green, and South Kensington had been sneered at as a “pathological museum for design disease” by those favouring order and logic. In 1904 Major Cain travelled with the Director, Sir Casper Purdon Clarke, and Arthur Skinner, who was to succeed Clarke, to the opening of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin: they went also to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, and Cain went on to Munich, where the display impressed him. They went in 1901 to the opening in Paris, in the Louvre, of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and saw that the display mixed “order and connection to facilitate study” with “sufficient variety to give the feeling of life: thus a piece of tapestry is seen, as it should be, over a bed, a chest or a seat, not placed in a line between an earlier and a later specimen.” This was what Prosper Cain would have wished to achieve. But it was not to be. The Museum’s fate was to be decided by