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 tell me stories of gnomes who lived in the roots and churned butter out of the sap owing from the knotted branches.’

This may have been an exaggerated view of Rackham at the age of thirty-three, but it is true to say that in appearance he had aged rapidly – his, after all, was a life of intense application. The clear-cut, earnest, distinguished features above the high collar (as we see them in many early photographs) soon became deeply grooved; he lost his hair young; except in bed, he was never without steel or gold-rimmed spectacles, of which he owned a great variety – reading spectacles, spectacles for tennis, bi-focal spectacles. He remained a neat, alert person, tidy, energetic, punctual. Amateur theatricals were for many years a persistent interest; in 1900 he played Blore the butler in Pinero’s Dandy Dick, and he also designed the scenery and acted in performances of Gilbert and Sullivan. He kept himself fit with lawn tennis and exercise on a trapeze. He was active and precise in all he did, whether working or playing, in which there was really little difference since he enjoyed his work and took his play seriously. If he grew slightly balder, more wrinkled and silvery during the years, this hardly altered his general appearance.

Edyth Starkie, with a smooth pink-and-white complexion, unlined to the end of her life, with wide-open Irish blue eyes ever full of mischief, her hair snow-white from an early age, was the antithesis of Arthur Rackham in character. She had a charm which made everybody like her and many people love her. If she was not conventionally beautiful, she gave the impression of beauty. She made her friends laugh without ever really saying anything particularly witty, and she could give great comfort by her sympathy and understanding. Servants and tradesmen adored her. An original experimenter in interior decoration, she was keen on new ideas of all kinds, with a passion for motoring and later for the wireless. She would launch herself into daring arguments in favour of free-love or Communism – but entirely theoretically, for she herself lived the mildest and