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By Root 2238 0

and Albert Museum. He opened them with a golden key, with a stem of steel damascened with gold. The long white buildings, which had emerged slowly from their wrappings of tarpaulin, and thickets of scaffolding, were judged to be rhythmic and lovely, were compared to symphonies and chorales. The opening was attended by a glistening crowd of courtiers and dignitaries. The Webbs were there, and Alma-Tadema, with Balfour, Churchill and the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. The workers who had made the building were there, in smart suits, with bowler hats or top hats; they read an Address, composed by themselves, at the monarch’s personal request. The choir from the Royal College of Music, perched high in an arch, sang Dowland’s piercing “Awake, sweet love” and the Irish Guards played in the background. Prosper Cain was among the party, elegant in his uniform.

He was, like many of his colleagues and many amongst the public, disappointed by the uniform whiteness and looming austerity of the inside of the new buildings. The Keeper of the Wallace Collection, Claude Phillips, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he was “overwhelmed by the vastness, the coldness, the nakedness” of the new halls. The interior still resembled a warehouse, or a public hospital. Prosper Cain had been present when the then Director, Arthur Banks Skinner, had been harshly and suddenly demoted in a public meeting, called to announce a new Director, Cecil Harcourt Smith. Skinner was aesthetic. The new regime was orderly and utilitarian. The civil servant in charge, Sir Robert Morant, was a failed candidate for Holy Orders, who had tutored the royal children in Siam. Objects in the museum were displayed by the succession of materials: glass with glass, steel with steel, cloth with cloth, like with like, so that the craftsman might study the development of his skill, and the historian the changes over time. Claude Phillips wrote that the soul had gone, that beauty had vanished. The newspapers made grumbling comparisons with the imaginative arrangements in German museums, in Berlin, and Munich. Prosper agreed with them, and was distressed by Skinner’s quiet, humiliated grief. He was detaching himself from his work, involuntarily and half unconscious of it.

He had had to move house, and was now in a pretty Arts and Crafts town house in Chelsea, with more space—not for his random collection of objects, but for nurses, nurseries, and vociferous babies. Frau Goldwasser had returned, with the energetic Julia in her arms, to find she had an airy bedroom, with a delicious French wallpaper and pretty electric lights. Prosper and Imogen had discussed things, and decided that one nurse and one nursery would do for two babies. The room was most beautifully decorated by the ladies from the Glasgow School of Art. There was a frieze of flying, ephemeral creatures, and white tables and chairs of a severe yet delightful modern design.

Cordelia was six months old and Julia five. It is an age when a baby can sit up, but not an age when it takes much notice of another baby. They had a nanny and a nursemaid. Florence had breast-fed her baby at first. Imogen had not been able to do so.

Florence, with her laughing child, saw what she could always have seen, if she had cared, that Imogen was afraid of her. Cordelia was a quiet, watchful little mite, tentative even when she reached for a rattle. Julia crowed and bounced, and had brief fits of roaring rage. Florence found herself encouraging Cordelia to play, and then talking naturally to Imogen. Prosper Cain smiled wryly under his moustache.

Florence could not, of course, return to Newnham College. She went to see Leslie Skinner, and started attending lectures, and classes in History, at University College. Dorothy was still with the Skinners. Florence discovered that Dorothy was now an MD and qualified to practise as a doctor. She was continuing her studies: she wanted to qualify as a surgeon. She was working in the Women’s Hospital. She invited Florence, with Griselda, who was a postgraduate student at Cambridge, to her graduation