I don’t know how it is with my contemporaries, but the truth about me is that at thirty I was much surer of myself and of accepted dogma than I am at seventy. At thirty, if I had heard a young girl remark that chastity is absurdly overrated, I should have been shocked; to-day I find myself capable of wondering if it may not be true: if we do not, in protecting that shadow, allow much sound substance to deteriorate? Doctors see more than most spectators, and with these eyes I have watched many and many an open-natured girl shrivel into an old maid and her finer juices turn to gall—all because she was not wooed and had not the courage to defy convention and woo for herself. The older one grows, the smaller is the number of sins. I can enumerate very few now, and if I live much longer there will be only one, and that is meanness. “Aren’t our bodies our own, to do as we like with?” is a question that may be said to be in the air in these days. And how explain to any young person, girl or boy, that the answer is No? Rose was not, so far as I could tell, as modern as this. But of course I could not hope for complete knowledge of her, even if I had probed for it. December and April are not confidants: at most they can be sympathetic. Such insight as I had into her philosophy and creed of living had to be gathered from generalities: from her comments on the day’s news, from her selective readings aloud from the papers, from her attitude to local misdemeanour: whether lenient or censorious. Lenience was certainly her tendency. In the idiom of to-day she was “for” all insurrectionists; she could even find it in her heart to be sorry for miners. “I don’t wonder they strike, poor things. The mystery is how they can go on digging that horrid black stuff at all, in the pitch dark too, no matter how much you pay them.” * * * * * It was one afternoon when Rose was eighteen that I realized that she was no longer merely a girl. Suddenly the peace of the garden was invaded by a series of snorts and explosions, and a motor-car rushed up the drive—one of those absurd little cars, very small and low, like an important roller skate, with just room for two, and a naked nymph in silver and without shame poised over the bonnet by way of mascot. The kind of vehicle brought into existence to meet the demands of second-lieutenants. Immediately afterwards I was told that a gentleman wished to see me, and behold there he was, in the sitting-room—a tall young man with a tiny moustache exactly the same width as his nose, and purple socks. Although obviously not lacking in self-assurance, he advanced rather nervously. “What can I do for you?” I asked. “You know I have retired from practice.” “O, it isn’t about any old malady,” he explained. “Thank Heaven I’m as fit as a fiddle. The fact is, I wanted to ask your advice. It’s about—Miss, Miss Holt.”