Lady Combe said she thought, anyhow, it was a shame to teach innocent children to have no respect for their elders, their country, or their God. Mrs. Rowlands said that, since Larsen’s investigation of juvenile crime, she would have thought it impossible for anyone to talk like that about innocent children. Mr. Rowlands said he hoped great good would come out of the new movement, great good. But he thought it would need a great deal of direction. Lady Combe said she would like to have the directing of it. Mrs. Rowlands said she thought Mr. Gomez (the leader of the new movement) was one of those men who are sent to make the world think. Lady Combe said that if she had Mr. Gumpish at the end of her garden-hose she’d make him think. Mr. Rowlands said he felt, anyhow, there was great promise of good in the Salvation Scouts. Lady Combe said she never had approved of the Salvation Army since they gave up preaching in the streets: “but that came, of course, of their getting endowments; it’s the old story, once you endow a religion you ruin it.” This was a hit at Mrs. Rowlands, who was well-known, in spite of her progressive views, to be hostile to the Disestablishment agitation which was then running through the country. “My own feeling,” she said, “is that our first duty is _charity_ towards others”—this with a venomous look at Lady Combe—and thereupon she took her leave. For a long time after this encounter Lady Combe would never go to the parish church, but ordered out her picturesque old Napier car (she planed, not on a helico but on an old push-plane; only she would not have even this out on Sunday) and drove off importantly to Buntingford. But I must not give the impression that these bickerings were typical of our little country society. There were brave days, when we would drive out to the meet (this was before the Universal Muzzling Act, which to my mind altered the whole character of foxhunting) at Braughing or Furneaux Pelham, and cheered as the huntsmen rode off: there were still a few old gentlemen in our part who followed the hounds themselves on horseback. Or when Christmas came round, and we would entertain the village children in mediæval fashion with a huge Christmas tree in the great Hall, and their merry laughter would ring through the house as they daringly plucked the snapdragon from the burning petrol. Or those autumn afternoons when the shooting-season was on, and you would hover with the guns at two or three hundred yards, fascinated to watch the beaters shooing their way through the thick undergrowth far below you. And so you would come back, refreshingly tired, to the ingle-nook by the comfortable stove-side, and tell stories of the day’s sport, while the dusk gathered after the mid-ocean glories of a Hertfordshire sunset. Well, well, the pseudo-Catullus was right—_fulsere vere candidi tibi soles_.