it difficult not to include me in her universal condemnation of men. It came to the point later when she could not bear a newspaper in the house. She was afraid of coming across something that would horrify her, some paragraph about the necessity of keeping up the population, or about women’s intelligence, or about the modern girl, or anything at all about women written by clergymen. We became members of the newly formed Constructive Birth Control Society and distributed its literature among the village women, to the scandal of my family. It was a great grief to my parents that Jenny was not baptized. My father wrote to Nancy’s godfather, who also happened to be my publisher, asking him to use his influence with Nancy, for whose religion he had promised at the font to be responsible, to make her give the child Christian baptism. They were scandalized too that Nancy, finding that it was legal to keep her own name for all purposes, refused to allow herself to be called Mrs. Graves in any circumstances. At first I had been doubtful about this, thinking that perhaps it was not worth the trouble and suspicion that it caused; but when I saw that Nancy was now treated as being without personal validity I was converted. At that time there was no equal guardianship and the children were the sole property of the father; the mother was not legally a parent. We worked it out later that our children were to be thought of as solely hers, but that since I looked after them so much the boys should take the name of Graves—the girls taking Nicholson. This of course has always baffled my parents. Nor could they understand then the intimacy of our relations with the nurse and the maid. They were both women to whom we had given a job because they were in bad luck. One of them was a girl who had had a child during the war by a soldier to whom she was engaged, who got killed in France shortly afterwards. Generosity to a woman like this was Christian, but intimacy seemed merely eccentric. XXVII In October 1919 I went up to Oxford at last. The lease of the Harlech house was ended and Nicholson gave us the furniture to take with us. The city was overcrowded; the lodging-house keepers, some of whom had nearly starved during the war, now had their rooms booked up terms ahead and charged accordingly. Keble College had put up army huts for its surplus students. There was not an unfurnished house to be had anywhere within the three-mile radius. I solved the difficulty by getting permission from my college authorities to live five miles out, on Boar’s Hill; I pleaded my lungs. John Masefield, who liked my poetry, offered to rent us a cottage at the bottom of his garden.