came out one evening in some talk—I forget about what—with Sybil.
“Oh, Dick!” said Gertrude a little impatiently, “Dick's Pi.”
And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theory of my innate and virginal piety.
6
It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls. But if that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland surroundings.
She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she