This lasted three or four years. Dear Mamma had her talons deep into George Augustus, vamped on him hideously, and was content. Dear Papa prayed in the garden and read the Right Hnble etcetera’s novels, and was uneasily content. George Augustus was pretty comfortable, and thought himself rather a hell of a bhoy because he occasionally sneaked off to a play or a whore, and bought some of the Vizitelly books on the sly. But there was one snag dear Mamma had not foreseen. Dear Papa had been fairly decently educated and brought up; he had, when a young man, travelled annually for several weeks, and had seen the Fields of Waterloo, Paris, and Ramsgate. After he married dear Mamma, he had to be content with Malvern and Ramsgate, for he was never allowed again to behold that wicked Continent. However, such is the force of Tradition, George Augustus was annually allowed a month’s holiday. In 1887 he visited Ireland; in 1888 Scotland; in 1889 the Lake District, with “pilgrimages” to the “shrines” of those unblemished geniuses, Wordsworth and Southey. But in 1890 George Augustus went to “rural Kent,” with “pilgrimages” to the Dingley Dell country and to the “shrine” of Sir Philip Sidney. But there were sirens awaiting our Odysseus in rural Kent. George Augustus met Isabel Hartly and before he knew where he was, had arranged irrevocably a marriage with her—_without_ telling dear Mamma. Hic incipit vita nova. Thus was George, young George, generated. The Hartlys must have been more fun than the Winterbournes. The Winterbournes had never done a damn thing in their lives, and were as stuffily, frowzily, mawkish-religiously boring as a family could be and still remain—I won’t say alive or even sentient—but, able to digest their very pudding-y meals. The Hartlys were different. They were poor Army. Pa Hartly had chased all round the Empire, dragging with him Ma Hartly, always in pod and always pupping in incongruous and inconvenient spots—the Egyptian desert, a shipwrecked troop-ship, a malarial morass in the West Indies, on the road to Khandahar. They had an inconceivable number of children, dead, dying and alive, of all ages and sexes. Finally, old Hartly settled down near his wife’s family in rural Kent, with a smallish pension, a tiny “private” income, and the world of his swarming progeny on his less than Atlantean shoulders. (I believe he had had two or three wives, all horribly fertile. No doubt, the earlier Mrs. Hartlys had perished of superfluous child-bearing, “superfœtation of τὸ ἒν.”) * * * * *