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Many men had wished to marry Aunt Emmy; not only sedentary professional men in long frock-coats, full to the brim of the best food, like Uncle Tom; but nice, lean, hungry-looking, open-air men who were majors, or country squires, or something interesting of that kind, whose clothes sat well on them, and who drew up in the Row on little skittish, curveting polo-ponies when Aunt Emmy and I walked there. I once asked her, after a certain good-looking Major Stoddart had ridden on, why she did not marry, but she only said reprovingly, with great dignity:

“You don’t understand such matters, my dear, or you would know that I could not possibly leave your Uncle Thomas.”

I was silenced. I felt with bitterness that this could not be her whole reason for celibacy, but that, owing to the purely superficial fact that my hair was still in a pigtail, she supposed I was unable to comprehend “lots of things” that I felt I understood perfectly, and on which my mind was already working with an energy which would have surprised her had she guessed it.

By this time I worshipped Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life. Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals to a young girl’s imagination.

I never forgot Major Stoddart, and when I was eighteen, and had left school and was living in Pembridge Square, I had the good fortune to come in for the remains of a scene between Aunt Emmy and Uncle Tom–the very day after I had turned up my hair.

It was at luncheon, to which I came in late. Uncle Thomas was in bed with gout, and Uncle Tom did not consider me of enough consequence to matter. He had not realised even now that I was a grown-up woman. Looking back after all these years, I am not sure that he was not astute enough to hope that I might prove an ally.

“What you have got to do, Emmy, is to think of the future,” he was saying, scooping all the visible eggs out of an aspic pie. “It’s no manner of use living only in the present. You think this comfortable home will go on for ever, where you have lived in luxury. It won’t. It can’t. It’s not in the nature of things. I saw Blackett yesterday (Blackett was the doctor), and he told me that if the governor’s gout rises–and nothing he can do can keep it down–he won’t last more than a year at longest. In the nature of things,” Uncle Tom continued, bolting half an egg, “I shall then marry. In fact–in short—-“

“Has Miss Collett accepted you?” said Aunt Emmy tremulously.

Miss Collett was a person of means, and of somewhat bulged attractions for those who admire size, of whom Uncle Tom had often spoken as a deuced fine woman.

“She has,” said Uncle Tom. “I made pretty sure of that before I said anything myself. Nothing immediate, you understand; but eventually–when the old governor goes–I don’t want to hurry him, Lord knows; but when the old man does pop off, I shall–bring her here.”

I looked round the room. I had seen Miss Collett, and the mahogany and ormolu dining-room, with its great gilt mirrors, seemed a fitting background for her.

“I am very glad, dear Tom,” said Aunt Emmy. “I think you and she will be very well suited, and I am sure she is very lucky, though I suppose I should never think any one quite good enough.”

“Oh! that’s all right,” said Uncle Tom. “And as for the luck, it’s all on my side.”

He did not really think this, I knew, but it was the right thing to say, so he said it.

“But I am not thinking only of myself,” he continued. “There is you to be considered.”