Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/72

60 directions, followed by the captive returns that were almost as ominous of what might still be before them as the famous tragic rentrée of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from Varennes); when he brought up, for their common relief, the essential fact of the young woman's history as they had suffered it to shape itself; her coming to them bereft and homeless, addressed, packed and registered after the fashion of a postal packet; their natural flutter of dismay and apprehension, but their patient acceptance of the charge; the five flurried governesses she had had in three years, who had so bored her and whom she had so deeply disconcerted; the remarkable disposition for drawing and daubing that she had shown from the first, and that had led them to consent to her haunting of a class, in town, that had made her acquainted with the as-yet-wholly-undistinguished young artist, Walter Puddick, who, with a couple of other keen and juvenile adventurers of the brush, "criticised," all at their ease, according to the queer new licence of the day, and with nobody to criticise them, eighty supposed daughters of gentlemen; the uncontrolled spread of her social connection in London, on the oddest lines, as a proof of this prosecution of her studies; her consequent prolonged absences, her strange explanations, and deeper duplicities, and presently, her bolder defiances; with her staying altogether, at last, one fine day, under pretext of a visit at Highgate,—and writing them at the end of the week, during which they had been