And indeed when Betty stood under the oak rafters of the great room, with its stained-glass windows and its wide floor, she could imagine it filled with laughing, dancing people of Elizabethan days, or as it looked when on a platform at one end of it, decked with holly and garlands of ivy, the players acted a masque before the standing crowd that filled the rest of the hall. “In this very place,” Godmother said, “_Twelfth Night_ was once acted, and it is thought that Shakespeare himself took part in the performance of his own play. I hope the people who dine in it now sometimes think of the folk who feasted and made merry here hundreds of years ago.” “Is it still the dining-room for the law people, then?” “Yes, the governors of the Inn, the benchers as they are called, and the students dine here, and by an old custom no student can become a barrister unless he or she has dined a certain fixed number of times in this Hall.” “_She?_” echoed Betty. “Yes, don’t you know that women have lately been allowed to study for the law?” Godmother laughed. “If any of all the famous lawyers now dead, could come back to this place, perhaps of all the changes the one that might most astonish them would be to find girls and women dining—‘keeping commons’ as it is called—in this Hall which for hundreds and hundreds of years has been sacred to men alone.” “_Shakespeare_ wouldn’t be so very surprised, perhaps?” suggested Betty. “He wasn’t a lawyer, of course. But he would remember writing about Portia.” Godmother laughed again. “Quite right, Betty. I’m sure he would. And now that you mention Shakespeare, do you remember anything about the Temple in his plays?” Betty shook her head. “These are the gardens of Middle Temple,” said Godmother, pointing to the lawns in front of the Hall (on one of which some young men were playing tennis). “It was the same garden that Shakespeare, who knew it well, chose for a famous scene in his play of _Henry the Sixth_ when the party of Lancaster chose the red rose and the party of York the white one for a badge.” “And then the Wars of the Roses began!” said Betty. “What does Shakespeare say about it?” “The scene goes like this. The gentlemen who take different sides in the quarrel between the House of York and Lancaster are just coming out of that very building,” Godmother began, pointing to the Hall, “and one of them says: ‘Within the Temple Hall we were too loud: The garden here is more convenient.’” “This _very_ garden,” interrupted Betty. “Only I expect it was wilder and had lots of flowers in it then?” “Evidently there were many rose bushes, for one noble, who is on the side of the Yorkists, says: ‘Let him that is a true born gentleman And stands upon the honour of his birth If he suppose that I have pleaded truth From off this briar pluck a white rose with me.’ Then Somerset, on the side of the Lancastrians, takes up the challenge: