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Updated: June 8, 2025
That simple, noble faith you have in women is most beautiful to me; one sees it so seldom in those who have lived always among fashionable men and women." A little speech that was intended to remind me how strange and fresh I was to this upper world. I began to find something like dislike to mademoiselle growing up in my mind; but I spoke to her of the Thesigers no more.
It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury their dead. The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of girls and of young men at play. Presently Viola came to me.
And the Thesigers were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think, considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave slander the most effective answer.
And you must remember that he was thirty-two when he married her, and that he had behind him an unknown history of struggle and humiliation and defeat. The Thesigers stood for the whole world of things that he had missed, the world of admired refinements and beautiful amenities, that, without abating one atom of its refinement and amenity, had persistently kicked him out.
Norah told me she didn't think he would stop long with us if he could go to Viola. Viola was his favourite sister. Well, he didn't go to Viola at all. He went first to the Thesigers at Lancaster Gate. Then he came on to us. That was all right. We had to arrange our dates to suit the General. On the Sunday we dined at Lancaster Gate; Viola and Jevons were not there.
Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way inappreciable to my friend the General. Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola till she had forgotten all about it.
Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me waiting. I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere.
He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle, and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk it." I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses in John's and Margaret's Quad.
He might just as well have laid down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop. From the very beginning, ever since the day when he had met Reggie Thesiger, he conceived that the whole world of Thesigers had challenged him to hold his own in it, and he was too stubborn a fighter to retire on a challenge. Besides, he couldn't have retracted without taking Viola with him.
"And next year I hope to be returned for Anstey, so that, of all men, I shall probably find him the most useful of acquaintances." She turned away, and a sudden conviction came over me that, for some reason or other, Coralie d'Aubergne did not like the Thesigers. I rode over to Harden Manor on the day following, and found Sir John at home.
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