She did not realise that the only way to keep on good terms with an aggressive personality is by the constant practice of evasion. Miss Onoria Strickland was an exemplary citizen. She had earned her own living with talent and success from the age of twenty-one, and she had been a masterful but helpful daughter to her aged parents. They aged a little prematurely under this assistance, and died within a year of each other. Opinion in Little Ticklington agreed that neither could support the full weight of Onoria’s attentions without the other. She nursed them to the last with a rigid application of common sense, which took the wind out of the local doctor’s sails. There was nothing left for him to suggest but medicines, and these were ineffectual. Onoria had never felt lonely during the lifetime of her parents. She left home at nine o’clock every morning and returned at five o’clock in the afternoon, except on Saturday, when she came back to lunch. No one could have had a fuller life; she managed her parents, did the household accounts, worked in the garden, or took Prendergast for a walk. Prendergast was a pug dog of a self-centred and exacting nature. He had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Strickland by an old friend of that name, and though Onoria had protested against the use of a surname for a pet dog, as unsuitable and even ridiculous, her father and mother had insisted querulously and unitedly that they wanted to call the pug “Prendergast” as a last tribute to their deceased friend; and as they were at this time feeble, and it was bad for them to insist, Onoria had wisely let her protest drop. After her parents’ death, Prendergast became the pivot upon which the household turned. Onoria was not sensible about Prendergast: she adored him. He was the one licensed folly of her ordered life. It must not be supposed that Romance had passed Onoria by. It had fallen at her feet early in life, and when she discovered how much nonsense it had about it, she had kicked it ruthlessly away. No one will ever know why Peter Gubbins worshipped Miss Strickland. He was a gentle, inoffensive youth, with a weak chin and bottle-neck shoulders; his strongest tastes were for magazines and barley sugar, and though he was easily convinced that he was unsuitable, he continued to worship Onoria in a melancholy but resigned manner for twenty years. Peter Gubbins was her next-door neighbour, and as the years went on a certain element of relief mingled with his melancholy. Miss Strickland had a piercing voice which swept across the garden, over the wall which divided their retreats; but there was a wall.