The Retrospect. Ada Cambridge

and thousands of truly saintly women who would not have a hand laid on the Athanasian Creed for anything. Not to speak of the innumerable brave fellows, souls of honour, flowers of chivalry, who believe as devoutly as they believe in God that the world would go to pieces utterly without its armies and navies.

      How often we hear elderly people gushing over their school days! "Ah, those were the happy days!" When I hear them I know exactly what they mean – not the school part of school days, but the free parts in between. I am not of those who sentimentally deceive themselves in this matter – the school parts to me were never happy. I have always known it. And when I came back to the scenes of my schooldays, when I stood in that quiet road at D – and looked up at the window of the room under the crow-stepped gable, I realised with a shudder how unutterably wretched they had been sometimes.

      But it is time I dragged my spirit eyes from that sad little nook in the house of dreams. I will not look at it again. I will take Memory through the ghost-haunted attics behind it and down the twisty stairs, to the lower floors and the garden and the company of my dear family, where she can play about much more cheerfully.