The next few years were a constant succession of wrangles with her mother. She had flatly refused to return to the convent, and if the Honourable Emily was petulant, her daughter was merciless. She had been put off with the drawing-master version of her mother's marriage, but that was enough; she held it over her mother's head, and Buck, if he had desired revenge, had it. She knew herself to be hybrid, and treated the Scarisbricks and their drawing-masters with equal scorn. Worse, she treated them equally with a contemptuous tolerance. She harped with pride on the baser strain. In a word, there was no doing anything with her.
She reached the age of twenty-one.
At twenty-two she expressed a wish to go on the stage. The Captain, who was genuinely fond of her, stopped that. At twenty-three she declared plainly that "a girl in her position" ought to have a means of earning her own living—not necessarily drawing. The Captain being averse from this also, she took the matter into her own hands by writing to the secretary of a Horticultural College in Somersetshire, paying her fees, and enrolling herself as a student without saying a word to anybody. She packed her boxes, and in the second week of January 1894 presented herself before her mother, dressed for travelling, and announced that she had very little time in which to catch her train.
"Oh, by the way," she said, turning at the door, "if you write, you might address letters to me in my own name—Causton."
Then she left.
"Was die Mutter träumt, das vollbringt die Tochter." Here, with its repetitions of and its departures from that of the Honourable Emily, follows her story.
PART I
RAINHAM PARVA
I
The Horticultural College at Rainham Parva, now defunct, was hardly a college in the modern sense at all. Its technical books were antiquated; it had only one or two old microscopes; and it totally lacked the newer trimmings of specialisation. Its founder, a Bristol seedsman called Chesson, had bought the place cheaply, house and all, a dozen years before, and having five hardy daughters eating their heads off at home, had, as the saying is, economically emancipated them. That meant then (whatever it may mean now) that, realising that the wages of two men and a boy might be saved, he had had them down to Rainham Parva and had set them to work.