She glanced at me gravely and sighed a long, deeply felt “_Yes_.” A long pause. The thing seemed to me to amount to a stale-mate. Fear came into my heart and much perplexity. “The—er—Roses,” I said. I felt like a drowning man. “Those roses—don’t you think they are—very beautiful flowers?” “Aren’t they!” she agreed gently. “There seems to be something in roses—something—I don’t know how to express it.” “Something,” I said helpfully. “Yes,” she said, “something. Isn’t there?” “So few people see it,” I said; “more’s the pity!” She sighed and said again very softly, “_Yes_.”... There was another long pause. I looked at her and she was thinking dreamily. The drowning sensation returned, the fear and enfeeblement. I perceived by a sort of inspiration that her tea-cup was empty. “Let me take your cup,” I said abruptly, and, that secured, made for the table by the summer-house. I had no intention then of deserting my aunt. But close at hand the big French window of the drawing-room yawned inviting and suggestive. I can feel all that temptation now, and particularly the provocation of my collar. In an instant I was lost. I would—Just for a moment! I dashed in, put down the cup on the keys of the grand piano and fled upstairs, softly, swiftly, three steps at a time, to the sanctuary of my uncle’s study, his snuggery. I arrived there breathless, convinced there was no return for me. I was very glad and ashamed of myself, and desperate. By means of a penknife I contrived to break open his cabinet of cigars, drew a chair to the window, took off my coat, collar and tie, and remained smoking guiltily and rebelliously, and peeping through the blind at the assembly on the lawn until it was altogether gone.... The clergymen, I thought, were wonderful. III A few such pictures of those early days at Beckenham stand out, and then I find myself among the Chiselhurst memories. The Chiselhurst mansion had “grounds” rather than a mere garden, and there was a gardener’s cottage and a little lodge at the gate. The ascendant movement was always far more in evidence there than at Beckenham. The velocity was increasing. One night picks itself out as typical, as, in its way, marking an epoch. I was there, I think, about some advertisement stuff, on some sort of business anyhow, and my uncle and aunt had come back in a fly from a dinner at the Runcorns. (Even there he was nibbling at Runcorn with the idea of our great Amalgamation budding in his mind.) I got down there, I suppose, about eleven. I found the two of them sitting in the study, my aunt on a chair-arm with a whimsical pensiveness on her face, regarding my uncle, and he, much extended and very rotund, in the low arm-chair drawn up to the fender. “Look here, George,” said my uncle, after my first greetings. “I just been saying: We aren’t Oh Fay!” “Eh?” “Not Oh Fay! Socially!” “Old _Fly_, he means, George—French!”