There it is! Plain as the nose on your face! What is it all about? What are they saying Good-bye to? Come on! Think!"

His repeated insistence that she think made Monica confused and mulish. She sat and stared at him for perhaps two minutes, and then he spoke.

"It is Death, right enough, but not the Death of the body; it is the Death of Love. Listen to the passion in the last verse -- passion which Tosti has quite effectively partnered in the music. Haste -- the sense of constraint around the heart -- the pleading for a climax and the disappointment of that climax -- What is it? In human experience, what is it?"

Monica had no idea what it was.

"Well, Miss Lumpish Innocence, it is the Autumn of love; it is the failure of physical love; it is impotence. It is a physical inadequacy which brings in its train a terrible and crushing sense of spiritual inadequacy. It is the sadness of increasing age. It is the price which life exacts for maturity. It is the foreknowledge of Death itself. It is the inspiration of some of the world's great art, and it is also at the root of an enormous amount of bad theatre, and Hollywood movies, and the boo-hoo-hoo of popular music. It is one of the principal springs of that delicious and somewhat bogus emotion -- Renunciation. And Whyte-Melville and old Tosti have crammed it into twenty lines of verse and a hundred or so bars of music, and while the result may not be great, by God it's true and real, and that is why that song still has a kick like a mule, for all its old-fashionedness. Follow me?"

Monica sat for a time, pondering. What Revelstoke had said struck forcibly on her mind, and she felt that it would have opened new doors to her if she had fully understood it. And she wanted to understand. So, after a pause, she looked him in the eye.

"What's impotence?"

Revelstoke looked at her fixedly. Ribald comment rose at once to his tongue, but Monica's seriousness asked for something better than that. He answered her seriously.

"It is when you want to perform the act of love, and can't," he said. "The difficulty is peculiar to men in that particular form, but it is equally distressing to both partners. The symbolism of the poem is very well chosen."

There was silence for perhaps three minutes, while Monica pondered. "I don't see the good of it," she said at last. "You take an old song that hundreds of people must have sung and you drag it down so it just means a nasty trouble that men get. Is that supposed to make it easier for me to sing it? Or are you making fun of me?"

"I am not making fun of you, and I have not done what you said. I have related quite a good poem to a desperate human experience which, in my opinion, is the source from which it springs. If you think of a poem as a pretty trifle that silly men make up while smelling flowers, my interpretation is no good to you. But if you think of a poem as a flash of insight, a fragment of truth, a break in the cloud of human nonsense and pretence, my interpretation is valid. When you sing, you call from the depth of your own experience to the depth of experience in your hearer. And depth of experience has its physical counterpart, believe me; we aren't disembodied spirits, you know, nor are we beautiful, clear souls cumbered with ugly indecent bodies. This song isn't about 'a nasty trouble that men get' -- to use your own depressingly middle-class words; it is about the death of love, and the foreknowledge of death; it is an intimation of mortality. As you say, hundreds of people have sung it without necessarily looking very deeply into it, and thousands of listeners have been moved without knowing why. Poetry and music can speak directly to depths of experience in us which we possess without being conscious of them, in language which we understand only imperfectly. But there must be some of us who understand better than others, and who give the best of ourselves to that understanding. If you are to be one of them, you must be ready to make a painful exploration of yourself. When I came in here just now, you were playing a rather silly piece in a very silly way. You sang your folksongs like a cheap Marie Antoinette pretending to be a shepherdess. Domdaniel wants you to be better than that, and so he has sent you to me."

"Do you think Sir Benedict thinks about songs and poetry the way you do?"

"Sir Benedict dearly loves to play the role of the exquisitely dressed, debonair, frivolous man of the world. But he's no fool. And he thinks you are no fool, too. He told me so. Here's your cup of tea that I promised you."

It was very nasty tea. Monica drank it reflectively. After a time, during which Revelstoke had stared intently at her, he said -- "What are you thinking about?"

"I was thinking that you're not really simpatico."

"I've no time for charm. Many people think me extremely unpleasant, and I cultivate that, because it keeps fools at a distance."

"Mr Molloy says you're quite the genius."

"Mr Molloy, in his limited way, is quite right. -- Well, are you coming to me for lessons?"

"Yes."

"All right. Give me thirty shillings now, for your subscription to Lantern. Here's a copy of the latest number. And next time you come here, have the politeness to ring the bell. It'll spare your blushes."

[SIX].

If Monica had been in danger from loneliness and boredom before, she would now have found herself in danger of being exhausted, had it not been that, as Sir Benedict had said, she was as strong as a horse. She thoroughly enjoyed the excitement. Molloy continued to take her association with Revelstoke as an intentional affront offered to his own powers as a teacher by Domdaniel, and he worked her very hard on exercises designed to develop those two characteristics of the voice which he called, in his old-fashioned nomenclature, "the florid and the pathetic", and which Sir Benedict preferred to call "agility and legato". He imparted his infallible method to her in a sort of pedagogic fury, nagged ceaselessly about the importance of breath and posture in the control of nervousness, and inquired searchingly about what she ate, and how much. In a veiled manner, he inquired about the regularity of her bowels. The poise of her head and the relaxation of her jaw become obsessions with him, and sometimes she woke in the night, startled to hear his voice shouting "Head forward and up -- not backward and down -- lead with your head!"

Revelstoke said very little to her about the production of her voice, and it did not take her long to discover that he knew little about it. "Let the ineffable Murtagh teach you the mechanics," said he, "and I'll take care of your style." But he led her on to tell him what Molloy did and said at lessons, and she, finding that imitations of the Irishman amused him, could not resist the temptation to oblige, now and then, though she felt rather cheap afterward. Molloy was so truly kind, so unstinting in his efforts on her behalf, and yet -- it was not easy to resist a young and clever man who wanted her to make sport of the older, exuberant one. She salved her conscience by telling it that she meant no real unkindness, and that everybody, including Sir Benedict, laughed at him.

With Revelstoke she toiled through a great amount of the literature of song, not studying it for the purpose of singing but, in his phrase, "getting the hang of it." Nevertheless, this process was hard work, and involved excursions into poetry in English, German and French which taxed and expanded her knowledge of those languages.

She knew no Italian, and Revelstoke urged Sir Benedict to find a teacher for her. This added to her day's work considerably, for Signor Sacchi was a zealot, yearning to get her into Dante at the first possible moment.

It was with English, however, that she had most trouble. Molloy, as good as his word, had moderated her Ontario accent to a point where she had occasional misgivings that her mother would consider her present speech "a lotta snottery". But it would not do for Revelstoke. He condemned much in her new manner of speech as "suburban", and insisted on a standard of purity of his own. Her former models, the actors at the Old Vic, he dismissed out of hand; their speech reeked, he said, of South London tennis clubs.

"English is not a language of quantities, like Latin," he said, over and over again, "but a language of strong and weak stresses. A faulty stress destroys the meaning and flavour of a word, and distorts the quality of a line of verse. Without a just appreciation of the stresses in a line of verse, you cannot sing it -- for singing is first, last and all the time a form of human eloquence, speech raised to the highest degree."

His manner of teaching was confusing to Monica's straightforward intelligence, for she never knew when he was joking. She had been accustomed in her schooldays to teachers whose jokes were infrequent, and clearly labelled. But after a few weeks she learned to identify certain tones of voice which signified irony, and even to enjoy it, though hers was by no means an ironical cast of mind. It was the variety and apparent depth of his knowledge which principally amazed her, and she never became accustomed to his ability to quote from the Bible, though it was obvious that one who lived so evil a life (Miss Kinwellmarshe's garments were forever turning up in unforeseen places) must be an unbeliever.

One day, after he had talked to her for half an hour about Schubert's settings of poems by Miiller, and of the ability of a poet of very modest achievement to inspire a musical genius of the first order, she ventured to thank him, and to say that it was wonderfully educational. He understood that the clumsiness and seeming patronage of the phrase concealed a genuine humility of feeling, but he uttered a warning which lodged itself in her mind.

"I know what you mean," said he, "but I wish you wouldn't use words like 'educational', which have grown sour from being so much in the wrong people's mouths. What we are doing isn't really educational. It's enlightening, I suppose, and its purpose is to nurture the spirit. If formal education has any bearing on the arts at all, its purpose is to make critics, not artists. Its usual effect is to cage the spirit in other people's ideas -- the ideas of poets and philosophers, which were once splendid insights into the nature of life, but which people who have no insights of their own have hardened into dogmas. It is the spirit we must work with, and not the mind as such. For 'the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God'."

Thus, rather quickly, all things considered, Revelstoke persuaded Monica to give up her determination to learn like a parrot, and to imitate her masters without really understanding what they did, and brought her to a point where she could feel a little, and understand, respect and cherish her own feeling.

[SEVEN].

"Old Giles is one of the best; it's a treat to know him -- but it's his bloody menagerie that kills." Thus spoke Bun Eccles to Monica a few weeks after her lessons with Revelstoke began, as they were having a drink in the saloon bar of The Willing Horse. Monica agreed heartily.

In fairness she had to admit in her own mind that Eccles himself was a prominent and disturbing element in Revelstoke's menagerie. John Macarthur Eccles was the young man whom she had met coming down Revelstoke's stairs the first day she visited him; he was an Australian painter, always called Bun, which was an abbreviation of Bunyip. Very early in their acquaintance Monica asked him indignantly why he had urged her to go up without warning, knowing what he knew. His answer was characteristic: "Well, kid, I'd just dropped in on 'em and they were as mad as snakes, and I wanted to find out what you'd all do."

Bun was grandiloquently called the Art Editor of Lantern. He did woodcuts and ornamental spots for the magazine, and was supposed to take care of its typography, but as he understood little of this craft, and rarely knew what day of the week it was, the work was usually done by the printer. Lantern was printed by a very good firm, Raikes Brothers, because a nephew of the senior Mr Raikes was interested in it, and sometimes had his satirical verses printed in it. Raikes Brothers also looked after the mailing of copies to subscribers, because nobody else connected with the magazine had a complete list of those fortunate creatures, though there was a shoe box somewhere with index cards in it, upon which Miss Kinwellmarshe had written the names and addresses of some of them. Lantern was without a business manager, although it had an impressive list of editors and contributors. It also lacked any facilities for dealing with possible advertisers, though two or three extremely persistent publishers and musical firms had sought out some responsible person at Raikes Brothers, and positively insisted on buying advertising space.

It was Lantern which accounted for Revelstoke's menagerie. The copy which he gave to Monica on her first visit mystified her completely; it resisted her most earnest attempts to find out what it was all about. It was handsomely printed, and contained several articles which were manifestly very angry and scornful on a high level, and some photographs and caricatures. But everything in it seemed to presuppose a special body of knowledge in the reader, and to allude to this private preserve of indignation and disgust in a way which shut out the uninitiated. It was not for some time that she learned that Lantern really was a very special publication. It was devoted in a large part to criticism of critics -- of literary critics, theatre critics, critics of painting, and music critics. These critics were, it appeared, without exception men of mean capacities and superficial knowledge; it was the task of Lantern to show them up. Of course, if you did not read the popular critics in the first place, Lantern meant nothing to you.

Revelstoke wrote about music himself, and was one-half of the editor-in-chief; the other half was a frail, gentle creature called Phanuel Tuke, who looked after the literary side. Tuke was not particularly indignant; his long suit was critical sensibility, and he was always discovering masterpieces which coarser critics had overlooked, or finding beauties in books which the rough fellows in the Sunday papers and middlebrow weeklies had condemned as tripe. It was widely believed in his circle that stupendous integrity was lodged in Tuke's meagre frame, and that he was unquestionably the foremost wit of his day in London. His wit was of the sort which is called dry; indeed, it was so very dry that Monica could not detect any flavour in it at all, smack her lips as she might over some of his most valued remarks and apt rejoinders. But she was sure the fault was hers. Apart from the elusive quality of his wit, she liked Tuke, who was a decent little man and needed mothering, even by young virgins.

Tuke's constant companion and defender was a plain, square Irish girl in her early thirties, called Bridget Tooley; she was always on the lookout for a chance to fight somebody for Tuke. She wrote, in some sense that was never clearly defined, and apparently her stuff was too good to be published very often. When Tuke was late with his material for Lantern it was always Miss Tooley who stumped up the stairs and broke the news. For no very good reason Revelstoke's flat was the headquarters of the publication, to the great alarm of his landlady, Mrs Klein. She had come to England as a refugee, and had never accustomed herself to English law as it relates to lodgings and apartments; in consequence she was perpetually in dread that the police might descend upon her and charge her with permitting a business to be conducted on her premises, without having an appropriate licence. Poor soul, she could not comprehend how little like a business Lantern was, and so she appeared from time to time, like the wicked fairy in a ballet, and made pitiful scenes.

Nobody was particularly rude to Mrs Klein except Odo Odingsels, the photographer. He was a very tall, loose-jointed man of some northern European stock which was never identified; he had beautiful, liquid brown eyes, but his appearance was spoiled by his unusual dirtiness, and by a form of spotty baldness from which he suffered, and which made his head look as though it had been nibbled by rats. It was his unpleasant way to shout loudly at Mrs Klein in German, which made her cry. This was embarrassing, but it was widely admitted that Odingsels was a genius with a camera, and must be allowed his little ways.

These were the principal visitors to the flat in Tite Street -- if the term visitor may be applied to someone who may come at any hour of day or night, and stay for anything up to ten hours at a stretch. It was not uncommon for Monica to have a lesson with Revelstoke while Tuke and Tooley whispered over a manuscript in a corner, and Odingsels ate fish out of the tin almost under her elbow. Pyewacket contended with her at every lesson for the master's attention. But Revelstoke's concentration was complete, and she learned to disregard external distractions while they were working. All external distractions, that is to say, except Miss Persis Kinwellmarshe.

"You got the wrong ideas about Old Perse," Bun Eccles told her. "She's just supplying something Old Giles needs; sheilas are his hobby. Never without a girl; can't leave 'em alone. Now me, for instance, I like a squeeze and a squirt now and then, same as the next chap, just to make sure everything's still attached to the main, but beer's my real hobby. But Old Giles -- he's never had enough. And it's the same with Perse; she likes it. But apart from that all there is between 'em is a sort of intellectual companionship, you might call it. Old Giles is a genius, you see, and that's what Perse really wants. Her home, you see -- well, her Dad's an ex-admiral, wears a monocle, still wishes the Morning Post'd never folded up -- and she's in revolt against all that. Doesn't want to be a lady in Tunbridge bloody Wells. Maybe she's overdone it, but she's a decent old cow, is Perse."

"She doesn't need to be so dirty about her appearance," said Monica, thinking this was safe ground for criticism.

"Aw, now kid, she does; it's revolt, see? And she's one of the lucky ones that looks just as good dirty as clean. She's a real stunner. I know. Anatomy. All that stuff. Perse is damn near perfect, but not poison perfect, you know, like those bloody great stone Greek sheilas in the Louvre. Have you looked seriously at her knees? Cor stone the crows, kid, that's perfection!"

"Knees! I'm surprised that's all you've seen."

"Aw now, stow that, Monny. That's small-town stuff. Sure I've seen all there is to see of Perse; she's posed a bit, as well as her hobby. But good knees are very, very rare. And when you get past all that pommy lah-di-dah she's a real nice girl."

"I'll bet!" said Monica. It was not irony on the level of Lantern, but it was heartfelt. "Next thing you'll be telling me she has a heart of gold."

"Well, so she has."

"Bun, that girl's a tramp, and you know it."

"Aw now, Monny, that's not like you. Perse is a wagtail, nobody denies it, but what's that to you? You don't have to be like her, if you don't choose. But don't come the Mrs Grundy around the Lantern; it's the wrong place for it. I'll get you another half-pint, to sweeten you up."

Monica had taken to going to The Willing Horse every day with Bun Eccles, but she could never rid herself of a feeling of guilt. There she was in a pub -- what would have been called a "beverage room" at home -- drinking beer. By the standards of her upbringing she was on the highroad to harlotry, but no harm ever befell her, and Eccles seemed to look on her as a friend, and to ply her with half-pints for no reason other than that he liked her. She even reached the point of paying for drinks herself, as it seemed to be quite all right for girls to do so in Lantern circles. Amy had told her, "You don't have to drink, dear, but never make a fuss about not drinking." And here she was, drinking like a fish, by her reckoning -- often two and three pints of beer in a day -- and the admonitions of Ma Gall and the adjurations of Pastor Beamis grew fainter in memory.

It was interesting, however, that some of her mother's saltier remarks kept intruding themselves into her mind, spoken in her mother's own tones, especially in connection with Miss Kinwellmarshe. Monica had not realized that there was so much of her mother in her. The feeling which often plagued her that she was drifting away from her family in speech and outlook was complemented by the realization that some of the mental judgements she passed on the people around her were unquestionably her mother's, and couched in her mother's roughest idiom. It was frightening; sometimes it seemed like a form of possession. For what she wanted most was experience, that experience which is supposed to broaden and enrich the soul of the artist, and what could Mrs Gall conceivably have to do with that?

To her surprise, she quickly gained a place in the Lantern group, for she possessed accomplishments alien to them. She could work a typewriter, and produce fair copy even on the senile portable Corona which was all the magazine owned. None of the others could use more than two fingers, and Miss Tooley and Miss Kinwellmarshe always fought bitterly about which should undertake this degrading work. Tuke wrote illegibly in pencil; Revelstoke wrote an elegant Italian hand, but so small that it was a penance to read much of it. Monica's professional speed seemed like magic to them. She could also keep books in an elementary fashion, and though Lantern had only one misleading petty cash book, she could come nearer to making it balance than anyone else. This was power, and Monica, who badly wanted to be indispensable to this glittering array of talent, was not slow to recognize it. She became more and more irregular in her visits to Madame Heber and Dr Schlesinger, for Tuke was happy to talk to her in French, and Odingsels and Mrs Klein provided her with plenty of practice in German. She could not elude Signor Sacchi, for she was a beginner in Italian, and she did not want to miss any of her lessons at Coram Square, where Molloy was working so hard to show himself the superior of Revelstoke. But there were days when Monica spent six and eight hours at a stretch in the flat in Tite Street typing, talking, accounting and learning. She became as familiar as Miss Kinwellmarshe with the small and disorderly kitchen; she lost her shame about going downstairs to the WC on the second floor landing (for Revelstoke's bathroom consisted of tub and basin only and was, as a usual thing, full of imperfectly laundered and extremely wet garments belonging to himself and Persis Kinwellmarshe). She was useful, she was wanted, and if she had been able to banish her hot gusts of disapproval of Persis, she would have been completely happy.

[EIGHT].

The Bridgetower Trustees had little, in these days, to draw them together, and their meetings were infrequent. After the June meeting in which they received the melancholy news that they would have to spend more on Monica, they did not meet again until the 21st of December, the second anniversary of the death of Louisa Hansen Bridgetower. There was not much for them to do except to hear Mr Snelgrove read two letters, of which the first was from the London solicitors, presenting their account of disbursements and expressing the hope, in a joyless, legal kind of way, that they were spending enough money. The other, and as usual the more interesting, letter was from Sir Benedict, and read thus:

Your protegee has been faring much better since her return from Paris where, as I expected, Miss Amy Neilson was able to do a great deal for her. She learns readily and is sensitive to atmosphere, and she now comports herself in a way which will smooth her path in the secondary, but important, social side of a singer's career.

In addition to her work with Mr Molloy, and her languages (to which Italian has been added) I am sending her to Giles Revelstoke for coaching in the literature of song, and some of the general musical culture which she so badly needs. You may be familiar with some of his work; he is, in my opinion, one of the most promising composers to appear in England for many a decade, and is especially gifted as a song-writer in a period when the real lyric gift is extremely rare. He speaks well of her progress.

You will be interested to know that I have taken upon myself to bring Monica to the attention of Lady Phoebe Elphinstone, who does a great deal of admirable work in introducing Commonwealth and American students to English families with whom they spend holiday periods which might otherwise find them at a loose end. Lady Phoebe has arranged that Monica shall spend the Christmas vacation period with a Mr and Mrs Griffith Hopkin-Griffiths of Neuadd Goch, Lianavon, Montgomeryshire. They are delightful people (Lady Phoebe assures me) and a taste of country-house life will be a pleasant experience for Monica, with whose character and talents I am increasingly impressed, and quite in line with the desires expressed for her by her late patroness, Mrs L. H. Bridgetower.

"Well!" said Miss Pottinger. "Country-house life! I only hope she has the gumption to take an appropriate house-gift. Should we cable her about it, I wonder?"

"I had gained the impression that there was no country-house life left," said Dean Knapp; "but then, in Wales probably things are on a much humbler scale."

"That is really all we have to consider," said Mr Snelgrove, "except expenditure. In spite of what Jodrell and Stanhope have been able to do, the money keeps piling up at the bank. It is unlikely that there will be any official questioning of our handling of funds, at least for some time, but we must bear in mind that we can be called upon for an accounting by the Public Trustee at his discretion."

When the meeting was over, Veronica served the Trustees with coffee and Christmas cake, using the fine Rockingham service which Auntie Puss regarded as her own.

"And how have you been keeping, Veronica?" said that lady, eyeing her speculatively.

"Very well, thank you, Miss Pottinger," said Veronica, but she wore a look of strain which was becoming habitual. Nearly two years had passed since the reading of Mrs Bridgetower's will, and so far there was no sign that she might have a child, and retrieve the Bridgetower money for her husband.

[NINE].

It was on the 21st of December that Monica set out from Paddington, travelled to Shrewsbury, changed her train and crossed the border of Wales to Trallwm, and there took a local to Llanavon. She had in her luggage a suitable house-gift (a large and expensive -- but not embarrassing -- box of candied fruits of appropriately Christmas-like appearance) so Miss Pottinger need not have feared for her on that score. But she carried in her heart misgivings about country-house life which were all that Miss Pottinger could possibly have desired. Everything that she had ever read, or seen in the movies, or heard, about the county gentry of Great Britain came back to her: would she have to hunt foxes? would she be despised because she could not ride a horse? what about the inevitable awesome butler? what about the equally inevitable heiress of broad acres, a picture of British hauteur and beauty (Miss Kinwellmarshe was cast mentally for this role) who would make her feel like a crumb, while being exquisitely but coldly polite all the time? Lady Phoebe Elphinstone had been perfectly wonderful and not a bit awesome, on the one occasion when Monica had met her, and Lady Phoebe's secretary, Miss Catriona Eigg of Uist, had been helpful and kind in every possible way, even to suggesting the box of fruits, but neither of these benign presences was on the train with her as she moved, at the deliberate pace of Welsh trains, from Shrewsbury to Trallwm.

There was, however, a man in the same carriage whom she had seen get on the train at Oxford, and who had, like herself, changed at Shrewsbury. A young man, apparently English from his clothes and his easy way with porters; a shortish, plumpish young man with a high colour (incipient broken veins in the cheeks?) and short dark hair very neatly brushed. As well as a large valise he carried a briefcase crammed with books, which he kept close to him on the seat as though its presence were a comfort. In his hand he had an orange-bound pamphlet, which he read with great concentration, moving his lips as he did so, and occasionally making phlegmy noises, apparently clearing his throat. But.the farther they travelled from Shrewsbury the greater his excitement became, and the less he worked over his book; at times he hung right out of the window, and gaped at the landscape. As a castle became fleetingly visible, nesting among trees, she thought he muttered "Peacock". When the train drew up at a tiny station labelled Buttington he threw open the door and said in an awed voice, under his breath The Battle of Buttingtune, 893", and stared in all directions at small holdings and distant hills until the guard locked him in again. He sank back on the seat, and stared at Monica with unseeing eyes. "An old and haughty nation, proud in arms," he whispered, and then repeated it, with greater emphasis. When the train drew up at Trallwm he hastily consulted his yellow pamphlet, leaned well out of the window, and fixed a porter with his eye.

"Arrgh!" he cried, in accents of despair. "Arrgh!" -- but no further utterance came.

"Yessir? What can I do for you, sir?" said the porter, and the young man fell back upon the seat, deflated.

Monica, with the inflexible determination of women travelling, snatched the porter for herself, and had her luggage transferred to the local for the coast which would take her to Llanavon. She took good care to get into a carriage far from the afflicted young man.

But when, half an hour later, she dismounted at Llanavon station, he did so too, and when a girl of about Monica's own age approached them and said "For Neuadd Goch?" it was he who said, "Yes, thanks, I'm John Scott Ripon."

Monica had never heard the name of her destination pronounced by a Welsh tongue. Lady Phoebe and Miss Eigg of Uist had tended to hurry over it and avoid it.

"Miss Gall?" said the girl. "I'm Ceinwen Griffiths; you're going to my uncle's, aren't you? I've brought the trap, because it's a fairly clear day, and I thought you might like to ride that way. Mr Lloyd'll take care of your luggage, and somebody'll bring it up in an hour or so."

She led the way to a pretty governess-cart, drawn by a pony. Monica had never seen such a thing before, and Ripon was delighted with it. He couldn't, he said, have possibly hoped for anything better.

Introductions left Monica somewhat flattened. John Scott Ripon, it appeared, was not English, but an American Rhodes scholar, and he seemed to get on very easy terms with Miss Ceinwen Griffiths in a matter of minutes. She was a girl who, without being pretty, was uncommonly attractive, for she had a soft and winning air, beautiful legs, and quite the loveliest speaking voice that Monica had ever heard; everything that she said was so beautifully articulated, and so charmingly stressed, that it was a kind of music. This was not the habitual downhill tune of English speech, or the tangle of stressed and unstressed syllables upon which Revelstoke insisted, but a form of speech-play -- a delight in sound and words for their own sake. It was fascinating, and it struck Monica mute. But not Ripon.

"I made a terrible boob of myself on the train," said he, as they set off in the pony-trap. "I was trying to speak Welsh to the porter at Trallwm. I'd been studying this book, you see -- Welsh in a Week -- and I wanted to say "A wnewch chwi edrych ar ol fy nheithglud?" -- thought I'd surprise him. But it all died in my throat. Of course I knew he'd speak English, but I thought I'd try it. I always like to try everything. Much Welsh spoken around here, Miss Griffiths?"

"No, hardly at all. A little on market days, when the people come in from the hills. And they wouldn't have spoken to you, except in English; it makes Welsh people shy, hearing it spoken by English-speaking people."

"Do you speak it at all?"

"Annhebig i'r mis dig du.

A gerydd i bawb garu; A bair tristlaw a byrddydd A gwynt i ysbeiliaw gwydd;

-- do you follow?"

"No, but it sounds great."

"That's a comment on today's weather by one of our old poets; you won't find it in Welsh in a Week. But I'm not a fair example. My father's quite a well-known Celtic scholar."

"Oh, that's wonderful! Then it'll be an even greater pleasure to meet him."