She often said about this time--touching wood as she did so--"could any woman be happier ?" She was so happy that she believed in God, went sometimes to St.Mary Abbott's or St.Paul's, Knightsbridge--the music was so jolly--and gave largely to cheerful charities as well as to the Suffrage Cause.

She would in the approach to Christmas, 1909, look round and survey her happiness: could any one have a more satisfactory husband?
Of course he was a man and had silly mannish prejudices, but then without them he would not be so lovable.

Her children--two boys and two girls--could you find greater darlings if you spent a week among the well-bred childern playing round the Round Pond?
Such _natural_ children with really original remarks and untrained ideas; not artificial Peter Pans who wistfully didn't want to grow up; not slavish little mimics of the Children's stories in vogue, pretending to play at Red Indians--when every one knew that Red Indians nowadays dressed like all the other citizens of the United States and Canada and sat in Congress and cultivated political "pulls" or sold patent medicines; or who said "Good hunting" and other Mowgli shibboleths to mystified relations from the mid-nineteenth century country towns; nor children who teased the cat or interfered with the cook or stole jam or did anything else that was obsolete; or decried Sullivan's music in favour of Debussy's or of Scarlatini's 17th century _tiraliras_; or wore spectacles and had to have their front teeth in gold clamps.

Just clear-eyed, good-tempered, good-looking, roguish and spontaneously natural and reasonably self-willed children, who adored their parents and did not openly mock at the Elishas that called on them.
Then there were Honoria's friends.

I gave a sort of list of them in Chapter II--which I am told has caused considerable offence, not by what was put _in_ but to those who were left out.