Marion went to Cheltenham when her sister Ethel was a baby two years old. She made many friends, for she was good at games and a creature of unusual spirit; but the principal feature of her life was a sudden and passionate friendship for one of her mistresses, a languid pre-Raphaelite young woman with a phthisical tendency who made her read a good deal of romantic literature of a sentimental kind. Miss Randall’s literary heroes were Parsifal and Galahad, and her fetish personal purity, the shame-faced purity of impotence. She was not fond of men, she said, although she allowed herself the licence of a spiritual flirtation with an advanced young priest of the Church of England, to whom she opened her soul. In due course Marion’s adoration of her mistress went the way of all such passions; but her taste for letters remained. In her eighteenth year her mother suddenly died, and she returned to The Dyke to look after her father and her baby sister. Even in the excitement of her new activities she rebelled, feeling herself isolated, alien, condemned to an infinity of small-talk. She became the hostess of her father’s friends; farmers of every age and type, who made love to her with varying degrees of rustic clumsiness but seemed to Mr Prosser the most desirable of suitors. Usually they drove up to The Dyke on Sunday evenings or after Ludlow market. Some, by their liquorish assumption of an easy conquest, offended her and caught the rough side of her tongue; but she soon found that with them her genteel shades of irony were so much waste of time, since they were not even understood. The young men retired puzzled, and their sisters sympathised with them. ‘She isn’t natural,’ they said, ‘and you can’t go against nature like that. I never could think what you saw in her.’ In this way Marion Prosser got a reputation for shrewishness and conceit. The young men of the neighbourhood felt that even the possession of The Dyke would be a small compensation for that of such a difficult wife. They began to treat her with the instinctive respect of the terrier for the hedge-hog, leaving her to her books and to her fancies. With these, for some years, she was content. The walls of her bedroom at the Dyke showed evidences of culture in as many strata as can be found in the coloured ribbon along the edge of a geological map of England. They ranged from the primary Rossettis of her Cheltenham period to reproductions of late impressionist pictures. Among books she groped her way determinedly. In Ludlow she found a branch of one of the London circulating libraries. Every week she would drive there in her pony trap and bring back the books that she had ordered, to the amazement of the stationer who kept the shop. Her father laughed at her tastes. Among his friends she gained the reputation of a bluestocking, which was enough to make any young man think twice before he spoke to her. And the years went by.