“If she gets into tagging round for ever after an old maid,” he explained to his wife, “she won’t marry. Why don’t you smarten her up a bit and take her out with you?” But Elsie wouldn’t be smartened up. She did not refuse new clothes, but she did not respond to them; and you cannot make a dead weight look chic. Mrs. Andrews tried. She would have liked a daughter she could take with her to tea parties, not one who practised Beethoven and read Shakespeare. Elsie loathed tea parties. She followed her mother on those rare occasions when she had failed to elude her as one who follows a corpse to the grave. People soon stopped asking Mrs. Andrews to bring her daughter. Then Mr. Andrews bought Elsie a tennis racket to play with the young people. She went out after the house was locked up at night and broke it against an oak tree in the garden. It was this act that convinced Onoria that Elsie had in her the spirit of the Fourteenth Century. If there was one thing Elsie disliked more than tea parties with her mother’s friends, it was tennis with young people. She could not play tennis and she disliked young people. They believed all the things Onoria said were not so—and they carried on conversations that were not solely for the sake of conversation. They seemed to wish to attract each other. Elsie knew that the fault lay in the women and she would have talked to the young men if they had looked at her, but they did not seem to see that she was there; and you cannot carry on a conversation with young men who do not look at you—however great your respect may be for the masculine sex. Onoria explained Elsie’s position to her kindly but firmly. “You are not a man’s woman,” she said to her, “and you had better make up your mind to it once and for all. I know men. They are hoodwinked and misled by appearances, owing no doubt to the false upbringing they receive from their mothers, but there it is—they rarely understand true merit until they have provided themselves with the contrary. You are not a marrying woman. Realise this and don’t hanker. There are many other things in life.” Elsie sighed and said she supposed there were. She did not sigh very heavily because she was still quite young and there was Onoria. Besides, the only husband she knew anything about was Mr. Andrews. He was by no means a bad husband as husbands go, he sometimes called his wife “Pussy,” and if no one did what he disliked, he was seldom cross; but he was not as interesting to Elsie as Onoria. What Elsie liked best in the world was sitting in Onoria’s garden, and being told what to think. Onoria was a well-informed woman with violent prejudices, and all her information was at the disposal of her prejudices. Her opinions were pitched battles, and her views (she intensely disliked what she called ‘viewy’ people, but she had her own views) were like the approaches of a distant thunderstorm. It might pass over if nothing happened to bring it down.