CARLINGTON ROAD,
November 20th.
Dearest Michael,
I’m so glad you’re still enjoying Oxford. I quite agree with you it would be better for me to wait a little while before I visit you, though I expect I should behave myself perfectly well. You’ll be glad to hear that I’ve got rid of this tiresome house. I’ve sold it to a retired Colonel—such an objectionable old man, and I’m really so pleased he’s bought it. It has been a most worrying autumn because the people next door were continually complaining of Stella’s piano, and really Carlington Road has become impossible. Such an air of living next door, and whenever I look out of the window the maid is shaking a mat and looking up to see if I’m interested. We must try to settle on a new house when you’re back in town. We’ll stay in a hotel for a while. Stella has had to take a studio, which I do not approve of her doing, and I cannot bear to see the piano going continually in and out of the house. There are so many things I want to talk to you about—money, and whether you would like to go to Paris during the holidays. I daresay we could find a house at some other time.
Your loving
Mother.
From Stella about the same time, Michael also received a letter.
My dear old Michael,
I seem to have made really a personal success at my concert, and I’ve taken a studio here because the man next door—a most frightful bounder—said the noise I made went through and through his wife. As she’s nearly as big round as the world, I wasn’t flattered. Mother is getting very fussy, and all sorts of strange women come to the house and talk about some society for dealing with Life with a capital letter. I think we’re going to be rather well off, and Mother wants to live in a house she’s seen in Park Street, but I want to take a house in Cheyne Walk. I hope you like Cheyne Walk, because this house has got a splendid studio in the garden and I thought with some mauve brocades it would look perfectly lovely. There’s a very good paneled room that you could have, and of course the studio would be half yours. I am working at a Franck concerto. I’m being painted by rather a nice youth, at least he would be nice, if he weren’t so much like a corpse. I suppose you’ll condescend to ask me down to Oxford next term.
Yours ever,
Stella.
P.S.—I’ve come to the conclusion that mere brilliancy of execution isn’t enough. Academic perfection is all very well, but I don’t think I shall appear in public again until I’ve lived a little. I really think life is rather exciting—unless it’s spelt with a capital letter.
Michael was glad that there seemed a prospect of employing his vacation in abolishing the thin red house in Carlington Road. He felt he would have found it queerly shriveled after the spaciousness of Oxford. He was sufficiently far along in his first term to be able to feel the privilege of possessing the High, and he could think of no other word to describe the sensation of walking down that street in company with Lonsdale and Grainger and others of his friends.