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Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman
Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman
Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman
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Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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In this delightful and witty novel, Laura Willowes rebels against pressure to be the perfect "maiden aunt." Not interested in men or the rushed life of London, Laura is forced to move there from her beloved countryside after the death of her father. Finally, she strikes out for the countryside on her own, selling her soul to an affable but rather simpleminded devil. First written in the 1920s, this book is timely and entertaining. It was the first selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1926.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 1979
ISBN9780897339520
Lolly Willowes: or, The Loving Huntsman
Author

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was an English musicologist, novelist, and poet. Her debut novel, Lolly Willowes, was published in 1926. Her focus was subverting societal norms, and her work heavily rejects the Church and embraces female empowerment and independence. Her romantic relationship with fellow poet Valentine Ackland influenced her own writing, and they collaborated on the collection Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933. The two were active in the Communist Party, and Marxist ideals appear in Warner’s later works.

Read more from Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Rating: 3.861731970949721 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Lolly Willowes : Or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner is sited in rural England at the time of the First World War. I favor the mid century women writers such as Warner. The novel gets off to a great start but Part 2 and Part 3 lost me. The protagonist, a young unmarried woman lives with her brother for about twenty-five years when she decides to go off on her own. She moves to a small nearby village and pursues her life but once she gets to the village and leads a solitudinous life she becomes boring to me. So I recommend this book with reservations.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Published in 1926, a few years before Virginia Woolf would deliver her "A room of one's own" lecture, this book charts the life of Laura Willowes, a sedate spinster well in her forties, who's spent all her life in the service of first her father and then her brother, wearing her independence uncomfortably but too apathetic to care much. An epiphany in a park leads her to leave all of that behind and move to a small rural village somewhat serendipitously selected from a guidebook. Here she can finally focus on her own happiness, aware as she's become that that possibility even exists. There she also explores different roles that are open to her as a middle-aged spinster of the years immediately after the first World War. Laura Willowes is an elegantly inviting character, drawn with precise observations and well-chosen obstacles; pity never became the main reason I was rooting for her. The plot is fairly sparse in this one, and many pages go by between those events and decisions that make the plot move forward. Instead Warner relies on a hypnotic style to convey the constrained emotional life of her main character. She more or less succeeded in making the journey a pleasant one, but at times I found the story slow going and caught myself wanting to read other books instead. But once I was well into part three, the story picked up again, with enough external stimuli on Laura's mental life to compensate for a fairly slow first two thirds. I also enjoyed the overall absurdity of that final third.The story slowly builds up to Laura's big monologue at the end, and even though this section could easily have devolved into a preachy tract, Warner keeps things deftly within Laura's voice, and it brings the whole of Laura's tale to a satisfying ending. At three stars, I've deducted a star for those parts where I felt bored. But I'm glad I persevered, since this novel develops a bizarrish yet rewarding ending to a sweet character.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The prose is difficult to decipher. 14 years ago, I had to read this book for class. I could barely get through it. At the time. I would have given it zero stars.

    I recently happened upon the book and decided to give it another go. This time around, I was able to read it through with relative ease. Time and a career editing other people's writings must have vastly improved my ability to understand ornately constructed sentences.

    While I can see why this book became a bestseller in its time, I would not want to read it again. The pace of the story is too slow for my liking.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful writing and a great 1926 feminist take on witches, the devil, a woman's life of drudgery and obscurity—not outdated in the least, unfortunately, but we're fortunate to have this fabulous novel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful dream-like writing. Lolly, one of the 'invisible women,' a forgettable middle-aged spinster, is grateful Satan (who doesn't seem a bad sort really) finds her and women like her interesting and worth "the hunt."
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Oddly satisfying period read about a woman drifting through life until she doesn't. Very chill book given that she ends in a town with a satanic cult -- but very vibrant and pleasing to read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The story of a spinster aunt who takes her life out of her siblings' hands and goes of to a small village which is quite pleasantly normal, then, when her nephew comes to write his novel in the village and requires her support, willingly sells her soul to be comfortable rid of him. The final sections are quite strange to one acclimatized to modern Wiccans and tropes of urban fantasy, and lean toward didactic, though the ambiguity of Lolly's Satan is refreshing.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found the main character to be annoyingly passive, so had minimal interest in how her life would turn out. Laura, called Lolly by her family, is a well-off spinster and could escape her dreary family any time she wants, but it's 1926 and it's hard for a woman to live independently, so she allows herself to become an indispensable maiden aunt, her individuality ignored. Eventually she escapes to a small village where she is happy until her nephew Tobias arrives and takes over her life. To make Tobias move away, Laura accepts help from an unusual source. I found the ending to be ludicrous, and it made me think even less of Laura. No-one likes a manipulative whiner!The points this book makes about women's independence may have been relevant and interesting in 1926 when it was first published.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    pretty good narrative though i felt a bit disengaged by the end; i wonder if the film "The Witch" is directly inspired by this. written in a lively, anachronistically quite biting and contemporary manner belying its 1926 publication date
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not quite what I expected -- the much vaunted (in book summary and introduction) deal with the devil doesn't come until the final third of the book, and it's with such a soft touch that I wondered why everyone took Warner at her word that a deal indeed had been made!

    Strong feminist message -- circled around for most of the book, then named explicitly at the very end in a monologue from Miss Willowes.

    4.5 stars for descriptions of being among nature in the English countryside. A , would imagine I was there.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really enjoyed this. Warm and nostalgic. A good read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Laura Willowes is a spinster aunt who stuns her family by fleeing their home to move to the remote Chiltern Hills village of Great Mop for no apparent reason other than that she was captivated by the smell of some beech leaves in a London florist shop, redolent of “dark rustling woods,” that came from the region. When she settles into a place there she learns that she is a witch.I loved it, beginning to end. On the other hand, my wife, to whom I read it aloud, declared it “the most boring book I have ever read.” Superlative, any way you slice it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Laura Willowes was a much loved daughter, she grew up happily in the country, and she became the kind of countrywoman whose life moved with the rhythms of nature in the way that lives had for generations. But when her beloved father died she became a ‘spare woman’ and her life was taken over by her brothers and their wives.Such was the way of the world in the 1920s, when Sylvia Townsend Warner told her story.“Caroline spoke affectionately, but her thoughts were elsewhere. They had already journeyed back to London to buy an eiderdown for the bed in the small spare-room. If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fire-place? Perhaps a bureau would be better, because of the extra drawers? Yes, that was it. Lolly could bring the little walnut bureau with the false handles on one side and the top that jumped up when you touched the spring by the ink-well. It had belonged to Lolly’s mother, and Lolly had always used it, so Sibyl could not raise any objections. Sibyl had no claim to it whatever, really. She had only been married to James for two years, and if the bureau had marked the morning-room wall-paper, she could easily put something else in its place. A stand with ferns and potted plants would look very nice.”The world was changing though, I knew it and there was something in the tone, in the rhythm of the words that told me too. There was a wonderful mixture of delicate observation, wry knowingness and love for the story being told; all of that made it feel very special.Laura accepted her family’s decision, accepted it as the natural way of things, and settled into a new life. She was absorbed by her family, and even her name was changed to Lolly, because one of one of her young nieces cannot pronounce “Laura” and that was the name she came out with instead. Nobody thought to as Laura if she minded. She was a wonderful aunt, she was loved, but she wasn’t valued.“Caroline resigned herself to spending the rest of her evenings with Laura beside her. The perpetual company of a sister-in-law was rather more than she had bargained for. Still, there she was, and Henry was right—they had been the proper people to make a home for Laura when her father died, and she was too old now to begin living by herself. It was not as if she had had any experience of life; she had passed from one guardianship to another: it was impossible to imagine Laura fending for herself. A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through Caroline’s thoughts. She did not attach an inordinate value to her wifehood and maternity; they were her duties, rather than her glories. But for all that she felt emotionally plumper than Laura. It was well to be loved, to be necessary to other people. But Laura too was loved, and Laura was necessary. Caroline did not know what the children would do without their Aunt Lolly.”As her nieces and nephews grew up Laura began to feel the gap in her life, and the country and its traditions began to call her back. All she could do though was fill the house with flowers. Until one magical day when the stars aligned, and Laura realised that she could have the life she wanted, a life of her own.Sylvia Townsend Warner had painted her gradual awakening to the call of the countryside beautifully, and she makes Laura’s final realisation quite glorious:“Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughs one after the other.” “As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left off singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot. No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.”Laura knows then that she must answer the call of the country, and fate guides her to the village of Great Mop, in the heart of Buckinghamshire. He family are astonished, they protest, but she goes anyway. And she finds happiness, she finds her place in the world, in the country.It was lovely to watch her quiet, simple transformation.But then the story changes.When Laura’s family intrude on her new life, when the balance is upset, the mystical thing that had been calling her towards her destiny became rather more tangible. And, for me, it didn’t quite work. The spirit of the story, the direction of the story was right, but it felt heavy-handed. The best books that dabble with things that may be real or may be fantastical are so captivating that I don’t stop to think about what is going on, and which it is. This part of the story didn’t quite catch me, it wasn’t quite subtle enough and I couldn’t love it as I’d loved what came before.I came unstuck near the end the first time I read ‘Lolly Willowes’ but not this timeI realised that I might be judging the book a little unfairly, because I’m comparing it with books that were written so much later, and with many of the books that I love the best of all.I have to cherish a book that, three years before Virginia Woolf published ‘A Room of One’s Own’, said:“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broom stick. It’s to escape all that, to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread a day ….”And I found so much to love that it was easy to let go of small disappointments.I loved the arc of the story, I loved the telling of the story, and I loved the spirit of the story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was lovely and delightful and absolutely satisfying. It spoke to me in the quietest and most empathetic ways.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Not to spoil you or anything, but "the Loving Huntsman" is Satan. This should give you a clue as to what you're in for with this book: a sly, sweet, subversive, and magical ride.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sylvia Townsend Warner was a feminist author in England who began publishing with her first novel at about the time that Virginia Wool published her seminal essay, "A Room of One's Own"*. Warner ran in different circles and was friendly with a number of the "Bright young things" of the 1920s that were famously satirized by Evelyn Waugh in his short novel Vile Bodies. Warner's first major success was this novel, Lolly Willowes, published in 1926.Lolly Willowes is the story of a middle-aged spinster who moves to a country village to escape her controlling relatives and takes up the practice of witchcraft. The novel opens at the turn of the twentieth century, with Laura (Lolly) Willowes moving from Somerset to London to live with her brother, Henry, and his family. Her move comes in the wake of the death of Laura's father, Everard, with whom she lived with at the family home, Lady Place. Laura's other brother, James, moves into Lady Place with his wife and his young son, Titus, with the intention to continue the family's brewing business. However, James dies suddenly of a heart attack and Lady Place is rented out, with the view that Titus, once grown up, will return to the home and run the business.Laura finds herself feeling increasingly stifled both by the obligations of being a live-in aunt and living in London. When shopping for flowers on the Moscow Road, Laura has an epiphany and realizes she must move to the country. Buying a guide book and map to the area, she decides upon the (fictional) village of Great Mop as her new home. Against the wishes of her extended family, Laura moves to Great Mop and finds herself entranced and overwhelmed by the chalk hills and beech woods. When out walking, she makes a pact with a supernatural force that she takes to be Satan, allowing her to remain in the Chilterns rather than return to her duties as an aunt. In the meantime, Titus, having visited Laura, has decided he wants to move from his lodgings in Bloomsbury to Great Mop and be a writer, rather than inheriting the family business. Laura is frustrated by this but is able to call upon black magic to discourage Titus to the extent that he decides to get married and retreat to London. The denouement of the story leaves Laura acknowledging that the new freedom she has achieved comes at the expense of knowing that she belongs to the 'satisfied but profound indifferent ownership' of Satan.Warner's writing style is sublime. She demonstrates a subtle humor leavened with unexpected turns of phrase that delighted this reader. Her take on this satirical comedy of manners incorporates elements of fantasy that represent, metaphorically, the plight of women in the era before they "have a room" of their own.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I think you all know the story of this little book by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The spinster aunt who goes to live with brother & wife and after helping to raise their children, goes out on her own. I enjoyed it greatly and I am sure will return to it again. I thought the writing brilliant and loved walking through the wood with Laura. I totally related to her. The family irritated me as I think they were meant to. Warner is wonderful. Four stars and recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A pleasant enough story at the beginning, but ending in a mystico-psychological way that annoyed me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    really enjoyed this. disappointing ending.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was an interesting read. Townsend Warner's prose is beautiful and magical and this was a lovely allegorical tale of a woman's journey towards independence.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lolly Willowes is the maiden aunt living hn her brothers house. She eventually tires of this and decides to move to a small Bedfordshire village where she finds her own place in the village. She also finds witchcraft and a place of her own. IIt's a gentle story, an exploration of finding your self and finding a role within the world. This is a time just after world war I, when some people still lived off small inheritances.It's an interesting look at that life and a woman's life then. I've read a fair number of books based in this period but from a man's point of view so this was an interesting change.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What a surprising and delightful book. This is about a woman who does not conform, does not fit the respectable mold, and who manages to persevere and even flourish as a result. This is not a typical "be true to yourself and everything will work out alright" tale, even though there are certainly strong elements of that sentiment to be derived. The supernatural aspects of this novel caught me completely by surprise and were, therefore, more effective.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Surprising and comforting.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A spinster sells her soul to the devil for kicks

Book preview

Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner

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INTRODUCTION

The novel opens with the death of Laura’s father. Before we meet Laura, we see her reflected in the mind of her sister-in-law Caroline. Caroline insists that of course Laura must come to live with them in London; now that her father is dead she has no place of her own. While she talks Caroline considers how she can squeeze Laura into the small spare room; it is actually too small for Laura to live in, but certainly the large room is too impressive to give Lolly. The small spare room will in itself be a loss; it is so handy for ordinary visitors, and it will be more expensive to wash the sheets for the large spare room bed because they are bigger …

We move from Caroline’s busy homemaking thoughts (the kind of thing that Laura says later settles on women’s minds like fine dust) to Laura herself, who is not thinking at all. She is sallow and has pale surprising eyes beneath her black mushroom hat. Caroline notes that the hat is countrified and unflattering. Laura herself slowly stains her wrist with the juice of a red geranium which she has picked and crushed. Once she remembers she stained her cheeks, but when she bent to look at herself in the greenhouse tank she saw only a dark, shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like a lady in an old holy painting.

So Laura is placed for us: mushrooms, crushed flowers, country matters. In London she will miss the greenhouse with its glossy tank, the appleroom, everything earthy and warm. Laura is an anomaly in the world of easy literary symbolism: she is a spinster, completely uninterested in men. Nevertheless she belongs irrevocably to the sources of life: to earth, seeds, bulbs. She has a taste for botany and a fancy for brewing. Despite the faint disquiet suggested by the description of her dark and shadowy image in the tank, she is involved completely with life and living things. Standing in the sunny churchyard at the funeral of the father whom she deeply loved, she hears the bees drone in the lime trees and thinks, In the midst of death we are in life.

The Willowes family, on the other hand, has a taste for preserving things. Two of their prized possessions are stuffed animals: an ermine and a perrokeet which sits perched on a slightly swaying green ring, as he did in life, and leering with mismatched glass eyes. Laura herself is not religious, as her family is, because religion seems to her to be something to be preserved. Caroline is very religious, and fanatically neat. She keeps her body linen arranged in beautiful orderliness, and remarks, when complimented on this by Laura, who prefers countrified disorder, that she, Caroline, is only following an example. The graveclothes, she explains, to Laura’s dismay, were found neatly folded in the tomb. Flowers in Caroline’s house are neatly arranged: there are vases, wire frames, scissors strung to a nail. A canary is kept in a cage.

Laura herself has been cast by the family for a passive female part. She was once in childhood tied to a tree by her brothers and left forgotten for hours. But again, surprisingly, she remained there contented, sitting in the grass, singing a little song about a snake. Her friends are toads and snakes, and she likes to visit the gardener in his greenhouse. Her evasive mother ignores the sight of Laura climbing trees and jumping over haystacks. Sooner or later, everyone agrees, she must be subdued into a young lady. But coming out means to Laura a kind of going in.

Delicately Sylvia Townsend Warner draws for us a picture of a young woman who has no desire for the sexual love of men. She was very close to her father; she loved him and the country life she led with him. Her upbringing has only furthered a tempermental indifference to the need of getting married.

When Laura moves to London the brooding fecund softness of the country is contrasted with the masculine hardness of the city: Henry has had the garden gravelled over, iron noises come from the kitchen: crashes, banging doors. The doors are always being noisily bolted and chained. Even the water is hard. And perhaps worst of all, there is the ugly sound of the clock being wound up. The clock has leaden weights: in London time, for Laura, is leaden.

The city and its conventions of marriage are linked with images of death. Possible husbands are produced for Laura; suitable and likely undertakers. Laura alienates one of these suitors who owed himself a wife by suggesting that he reminds her of a werewolf. Indeed, she sees him that way, almost playfully: cloaked in shaggy hides … a lamb dangling from his mouth.

Laura is called Aunt Lolly by the children. She became two persons, neither of whom was real to her: Aunt Lolly and Miss Willowes. (The willow is itself of course a symbol of death). But she left Laura behind, in her childhood home. She had quitted so much of herself it seemed natural to relinquish her name also.

But Laura strikes out to find herself, which means finding her freedom. She is bitterly threatened by her nephew Titus, charming and affectionate, the quintessence of masculinity: the usurping monarch. He follows her to her rural refuge which he finds delightful: he will write a book there about the painter Fuseli, and Aunt Lolly will cosset him. Laura feels that Titus loves the country with a comfortable love, a reasonable appreciative appetite. His love is masculine and possessive. He loved the country as though it were a body. He enjoys possession of it.

Laura does not love the country in this way. She is ashamed for the woods to see her with Titus. She has a great longing for the smell of woods, the dark rustling, shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial. She wishes to be shed almost wholly downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before she dies. Titus calls after her, Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a minute and I’ll come too. But she does not want him. She feels as though she has awakened from a sleep of years and all she wanted, oh, how much she wanted, was to be left alone for once.

She must be saved from Titus, who will drain her life away. She wants a life of her own. To have a life of one’s own, cries Laura, Not an existence doled out to you by others.

Not only the Willowes are responsible, she thinks, but Society, the Law, the Church, the Old Testament, great-great aunt Salome and her prayer-book, the Bank of England …

With a chilling immediacy this book speaks today, as it did in 1925, for women. Not only women like Laura who are incapable of loving men, but for all those who have been subdued into ladyhood, or dwindled into wives. Women were strongly concerned with their status during the first forty years of this century. Now, after a sleep of twenty years, they, like Lolly Willowes, are awake again, seeking for lives of their own.

Anita Miller

Chicago, Illinois

November, 1978

LOLLY WILLOWES

Part 1

WHEN her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her elder brother and his family.

Of course, said Caroline, you will come to us.

But it will upset all your plans. It will give you so much trouble. Are you sure you really want me?

"Oh dear, yes."

Caroline spoke affectionately, but her thoughts were elsewhere. They had already journeyed back to London to buy an eiderdown for the bed in the small spareroom. If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fireplace? Perhaps a bureau would be better, because of the extra drawers? Yes, that was it. Lolly could bring the little walnut bureau with the false handles on one side and the top that jumped up when you touched the spring by the ink-well. It had belonged to Lolly’s mother, and Lolly had always used it, so Sibyl could not raise any objections. Sibyl had no claim to it whatever, really. She had only been married to James for two years, and if the bureau had marked the morning-room wall-paper, she could easily put something else in its place. A stand with ferns and potted plants would look very nice.

Lolly was a gentle creature, and the little girls loved her; she would soon fit into her new home. The small spare-room would be rather a loss. They could not give up the large spare-room to Lolly, and the small spare-room was the handiest of the two for ordinary visitors. It seemed extravagant to wash a pair of the large linen sheets for a single guest who came but for a couple of nights. Still, there it was, and Henry was right—Lolly ought to come to them. London would be a pleasant change for her. She would meet nice people, and in London she would have a better chance of marrying. Lolly was twenty-eight. She would have to make haste if she were going to find a husband before she was thirty. Poor Lolly! black was not becoming to her. She looked sallow, and her pale grey eyes were paler and more surprising than ever underneath that very unbecoming black mushroom hat. Mourning was never satisfactory if one bought it in a country town.

While these thoughts passed through Caroline’s mind, Laura was not thinking at all. She had picked a red geranium flower, and was staining her left wrist with the juice of its crushed petals. So, when she was younger, she had stained her pale cheeks, and had bent over the greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank showed only a dark shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in the old holy painting that hung in the dining-room and was called the Leonardo.

The girls will be delighted, said Caroline. Laura roused herself. It was all settled, then, and she was going to live in London with Henry, and Caroline his wife, and Fancy and Marion his daughters. She would become an inmate of the tall house in Apsley Terrace where hitherto she had only been a country sister-in-law on a visit. She would recognise a special something in the physiognomy of that house-front which would enable her to stop certainly before it without glancing at the number or the door-knocker. Within it, she would know unhesitatingly which of the polished brown doors was which, and become quite indifferent to the position of the cistern, which had baffled her so one night when she lay awake trying to assemble the house inside the box of its outer walls. She would take the air in Hyde Park and watch the children on their ponies and the fashionable trim ladies in Rotten Row, and go to the theatre in a cab.

London life was very full and exciting. There were the shops, processions of the Royal Family and of the unemployed, the gold tunnel at Whiteley’s, and the brilliance of the streets by night. She thought of the street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed streets and squares—but they would be familiar then—complying with the sealed orders of the future; and presently she would be taking them for granted, as the Londoners do. But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray. She must leave all this behind, or only enjoy it as a visitor, unless James and Sibyl happened to feel, as Henry and Caroline did, that of course she must live with them.

Sibyl said: Dearest Lolly! So Henry and Caroline are to have you…. We shall miss you more than I can say, but of course you will prefer London. Dear old London with its picturesque fogs and its interesting people, and all. I quite envy you. But you mustn’t quite forsake Lady Place. You must come and pay us long visits, so that Tito doesn’t forget his aunt.

Will you miss me, Tito? said Laura, and stooped down to lay her face against his prickly bib and his smooth, warm head. Tito fastened his hands round her finger.

I’m sure he’ll miss your ring, Lolly, said Sibyl. You’ll have to cut the rest of your teeth on the poor old coral when Auntie Lolly goes, won’t you, my angel?

I’ll give him the ring if you think he’ll really miss it, Sibyl.

Sibyl’s eyes glowed; but she said:

Oh no, Lolly, I couldn’t think of taking it. Why, it’s a family ring.

When Fancy Willowes had grown up, and married, and lost her husband in the war, and driven a lorry for the Government, and married again from patriotic motives, she said to Owen Wolf-Saunders, her second husband:

How unenterprising women were in the old days! Look at Aunt Lolly. Grandfather left her five hundred a year, and she was nearly thirty when he died, and yet she could find nothing better to do than to settle down with Mum and Dad, and stay there ever since.

The position of single women was very different twenty years ago, answered Mr. Wolf-Saunders. "Feme sole, you know, and feme couverte, and all that sort of rot."

Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such possibilities did not occur to any of Laura’s relations. Her father being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into the household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best.

The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the good sense of their forbears. Finding that well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behaviour imposed upon them by the example of their ancestors.

Observing those canons, no member of the Willowes family had risen to much eminence. Perhaps great-great-aunt Salome had made the nearest approach to fame. It was a decent family boast that great-great-aunt Salome’s puff-paste had been commended by King George III. And great-great-aunt Salome’s prayer-book, with the services for King Charles the Martyr and the Restoration of the Royal Family and the welfare of the House of Hanover—a nice example of impartial piety—was always used by the wife of the head of the family. Salome, though married to a Canon of Salisbury, had taken off her embroidered kid gloves, turned up her sleeves, and gone into the kitchen to mix the paste for His Majesty’s eating, her Venice-point lappets dangling above the floury bowl. She was a loyal subject, a devout churchwoman, and a good housewife, and the Willoweses were properly proud of her. Titus, her father, had made a voyage to the Indies, and had

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