My holidays were chiefly spent at home, and indeed I could have asked nothing better. Few families, with our moderate income, can have enjoyed the proximity of London combined with the neighbourhood of such romantic scenery. Our house, I have said, faced on the fourth tee; and from the front windows the view stretched away, uninterrupted except by occasional bunkers, till on a clear day you could distinguish the flag on the seventh green. I saw little in those days of my father, who believed with Hector that home was the proper sphere of woman; for himself, he was out early and late in all weathers: a business interview would sometimes take him up to London, otherwise nothing disturbed the noiseless tenor of his daily habits. If there was a championship match on, we would hear all about it in the evening; for the rest, we knew that he did not care to be cross-questioned about the little incidents of the day. Yet, for all his silence, there was no mistaking the fire of the enthusiast burning in his eye. Nothing could daunt his tireless energy, though he was already a man of over fifty. I can still picture him as he was then, a fine, upstanding figure in his wide, loose knickerbockers and a coat that seemed full of extra seams and double linings; a trifle portly, yet carrying himself with a sort of natural swing. We have all too few of his type nowadays!
If my father was a type of manliness, my mother seemed and seems to me a perfect type of womanliness. The hundred little domestic duties of the day—in those days, the mistress of the house would order the dinner, go through the books, supervise the work of the servants, and altogether behave as a sort of unpaid agent—would occupy her till eleven or half-past eleven in the morning: only then would she put her season ticket in her reticule and set out for the mystery of the shops and the repose of her club. If an exhibition, a call, or a matinée was likely to detain her, she would leave word that she was not to be expected back till after tea, and the routine of the household would proceed as usual in her absence. She never came back from these expeditions without a catalogue for me, an evening paper for my father—some little token to assure us that her thoughts had been with us during the hours of enforced separation. Alas, how old age makes us realize the little return we made in youth for the loving solicitude of our parents! I often used to see little or nothing of her for a week, since my doctor wisely insisted that I should always have breakfast in bed after a dance. And dance I did, I am afraid, almost every night, if only to compensate myself for the early hours and rigorous discipline of the school, where half-past ten saw us at work every morning, and, on whole school days, preparation would not be over till half-past six. I was, I think I may say, a good dancer; not that I ever had much ear for music or sense of rhythm, but my athletic, I had almost said, my acrobatic, gifts stood me in good stead. I will not attempt to recall, so old-fashioned do they seem nowadays, the movements that were popular when I was a girl. What has become of you all now, my partners in those distant Georgian drawing-rooms? If you still live, do you still remember as I remember the measures we trod, then so riotous-seeming? The Monkey-grip, the Kansas scramble, the “Mind your foot, honey,” the Snake-glide, the Anyhow-slither, the Buzz, the Rattle-snake Fight, the Darkies’ Stagger, and all the rest of them?