But Mrs.Hooper did not love her husband's niece.

She was often inclined to wish, as she caught sight of Alice's pinched face, that the household had never seen her.

And yet without Connie's three hundred a year, where would the household be! Mrs.Hooper was painfully, one might have said, guiltily aware of that side of the business.

She was an incompetent, muddling woman, who had never learnt to practise the simple and dignified thrift so common in the academic households of the University.

For nowhere, really, was plain living gayer or more attractive than in the new Oxford of this date.