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occasionally wished that she would dress herself in
a more human way--patronise in winter the humble Viyella stripe, for
instance, or in summer the flippant sprig. But a large proportion of Mrs.
Gustus's faith was founded on simple strong colours in wide expanses,
introduced, as it were, one to another by judicious black. Anybody but
Mrs. Gustus would have been drowned in her clothes. But she was
conceived on a generous scale, she was almost gorgeous, she barely
missed exaggeration. In her manner I think she did not miss it. She had
therefore the gift of coping with colour. It remains for me to add that
her age was five-and-forty, and that she was a novelist. The recording
angel had probably noted the fact of her novelism among her virtues,
but she had an imperceptible earthly public. She wrote laborious books,
full of short peevish sentences, of such very pure construction that they
were extremely difficult to understand. She wore spectacles with
aggressive tortoise-shell rims. She said, "I am short-sighted. I am
obliged to wear spectacles. Why should I try to conceal the fact? I will
not have a pair of rimless ghosts haunting my face. I will wear
spectacles without shame." But the real truth was that the tortoise-shell
rims were more becoming to her. Mrs. Gustus was known to her
husband's family as Anonyma. The origin of this habit was an old joke,
and I have forgotten the point of it.
Cousin Gustus was second cousin once removed to Kew and Kew's
sister Jay, and had kindly brought them up from childhood. He was
now at the further end of the sixties, and embittered by many things: an
unsuitable marriage, the approach of the psalmist's age-limit, incurably
modern surroundings, an internal complaint, and a haunting wish to
relieve the Government of the management of the War. These
drawbacks were to a certain extent linked, they accounted for each
other. The complaint hindered him from offering his services as
Secretary of State; it made of him a slave, so he could not pretend to be
a master. He cherished his slavery, for it happened to be painless, and
supplied him with a certain dignity which would otherwise have been
difficult to secure. During the summer the complaint hibernated, and
ceased to interest either doctors or relations, which was naturally hard
to bear. To these trials you may add the disgraceful behaviour of his

young cousin Jay, and admit that Cousin Gustus had every excuse for
encouraging pessimism of the most pronounced type.
Jay's brother Kew was twenty-five, and from this it follows that he had
already drunk the surprising beverage of War. His military history
included a little splinter of hate in the left shoulder, followed by a
depressing period almost entirely spent in the society of medical boards,
three months of light duty consisting of weary instruction of fools in an
East coast town, and now an interval of leave at the end of which the
battalion to which he had lately been attached hoped to go to France. In
one way it was a pity he ever joined the Army, for khaki clashed badly
with most of Mrs. Gustus's colour theories. But he had never noticed
that: his eye and his ear and his mind were all equally slow to
appreciate clashings of any kind. He was rather aloof from comparison
and criticism, but not on principle. He had no principles--at least no
original ones, just the ordinary stuffy old principles of decency and all
that. He never turned his eyes inward, as far as the passer-by could see;
he lived a breezy life outside himself. He never tried to make a fine
Kew of himself; he never propounded riddles to his Creator, which is
the way most of us make our reputations.
Mr. Russell, the host and adopted member of the Family, was fifty-two.
He did not know Jay, having only lately been culled by Mrs.
Gustus--that assiduous collector--and placed in the bosom of the
Family. She had found him blossoming unloved in the wilderness of a
War Work Committee. He was well informed, yet a good listener;
perhaps he possessed both these virtues to excess. At any rate Mrs.
Gustus had decided that he was worthy of Family friendship, and,
being naturally extravagant, she conferred it upon him with both hands.
Mr. Russell was married to a woman who had not properly realised the
fact that she was Mrs. Russell. She spent her life in distant lands,
helping the world to become better. At present she was understood to
be propagating peace in the United States, and was never mentioned by
or to her husband. My first impression of Mr. Russell was that he was
rather fat, but I never could trace this impression to its