“Pay her for what?” “Her conversation, my boy. She’s quite clever and fearfully learned. Shaw likes her. She’s an anarchist and a determinist and all that and much older than you. She makes a business of tutoring youngsters who need--doing over a bit. You seem to have been reared on Henty and Shakespeare. Even Carlson says you need pruning. There’s no use being antediluvian even if you are a rising young leading man.... God, how I hate the breed! I shouldn’t waste these words on you if you didn’t show vagrom gleams of common sense now and then. So I most seriously beg of you to go and let Olive--Mrs. Ilden, tutor you for a fortnight.” Mark was always docile before authority. He asked, “What’ll she do to me?” “She can tell you anything you want to know and explain Winchester. The history of Winchester is the history of England,” Gail said, “and, of course, that’s the history of the world.” Thus, in early June, Mark was driven through Winchester and landed at the door of a brick house painted plum colour. A grey wall continued on either side of the ruddy front and nameless vines waved on the coping. Mark’s head ached from a supper at Romano’s the night previous but he admired the house and the obvious romance of the curving lane stippled with sunshine in plaques of honey. He rang the bell, gave a fat parlour-maid his card and waited for Mrs. Ilden in stolid terror. The hall had white panels of an approved stage pattern and was dotted with photographs. Mark was looking at the face of a bearded man whose eyebrows had a diabolic slant when Olive Ilden came in from her garden. She came in a bad temper, deserting the discussion of Chamberlain’s Imperial policy about her tea table. She was prepared for a repetition of her last paying pupil, the one son of a Rand millionaire, a cub who wore five rubies on one hand and who talked racing at four meals a day. Mark unsettled her by his wooden stare and the black decency of his dress. His clothes were English. He was always tanned. The scar of Cora Boyle’s curling irons lay in a thread along his left jaw. Olive revised a theory that Americans were short and looked up at him. “I’ve some friends at tea,” she said, “Of course, I don’t wish to impose tea on a Yankee.”