“Insomnia?” said Miss Linthorpe, “so much the better; she won’t inherit Blisworth’s gross habit of snoring.” “But, Aunt Adela, I daren’t; I don’t know what her father would say.” “Blisworth,” said the imperturbable old lady, “is a fool.” “Hush, aunt dear!” expostulated my mother; “you mustn’t say such things before the child.” “Why not?” was the answer. “I shan’t be the last person she hears calling (she pronounced it “callin’”) Blisworth a fool, unless she grows up deaf.” I liked Miss Linthorpe, in spite of her brutal manners, and never dreaded the prospect of her visits. Lady Trecastle lived in Ireland: at least, she used to spend about three weeks of the year at her Irish house before the Free State was declared in 1922, and after that never went near it at all, but filled in her time complaining of the “rebels,” as she called them, for making it impossible. Her visits to us were rather lengthy, and I have heard my father speculate whether he could not bribe the “rebels” to lure her back to Ireland and kidnap her. The fact was, I suppose, that English families had become so accustomed to playing the rôle of a governing race in Ireland that they found it hard to be tolerated as foreigners. It is difficult now to imagine the feeling that was excited then over the “Irish question.” Of our neighbours, our most frequent callers were a certain General Lestrange and his wife, whom I used to think very old-fashioned because my nurse told me they believed in ghosts. I imagine they were really bitten by that curious wave of occultism that made itself felt in English society at the beginning of the century. But I am afraid this undistinguished record will become wearisome if I prolong it. My father had long since given up political life, finding, no doubt, that it unduly cramped his energies: “It’s all very well,” he would say, “but you can’t really do two things at once”: consequently, the political life of the period passed us by, and we rusticated amidst a small coterie of country squires, who still (Heaven knows how) kept their estates and their large houses going. But my father’s inattention to the drift of the world around him was to have more fatal consequences. When I was only just fifteen, there came a black day on which he appeared gloomy and preoccupied, and I must not disturb him because he was “worried about business.” He spent all day at the telephone, and we all knew that something must be seriously wrong: indeed, they rang up from the club-house to know whether he was ill. It proved in the end that, through mismanagement on the part of others, he had lost far the greater part of his money, and it would be necessary in future to live in a much smaller house and sell Barstoke to anyone who would offer. By great good fortune, we managed to find purchasers: some Benedictine sisters, who had outgrown their previous accommodation, were willing to pay a good price for it. We were equally lucky on the other side, and secured a