And the next morning she wore a short blue skirt, with a silver belt round her waist, and spent the morning punting on the lake with Anthony Crawshay.
"I hope I look after you all properly," she said at lunch-time, in a certain charming deprecating way she has of speaking sometimes. "There really are punts, and horses, and motor cars, and things, if you want them. Will you all order what you like?"
Each man at the table then offered to take Mrs. Fielden for a ride, or a drive, or a row, and not one of them could be quite sure that she had refused to go with him.
"I want to go for a turn in the garden and talk about books," she said to me as we left the dining-room. And then I found that I was sitting in her boudoir having coffee with her, and that every one else was excluded from the room—how it was done I have not the slightest idea—and that by-and-by we left it by the open French windows, and were strolling in the garden in the spring sunshine. The garden, with its high walls, is sheltered from every wind that blows, and there are wide garden-seats in it painted white, and every border was bright with early spring flowers.
"I call this my Grove of Academe," said Mrs. Fielden.
"Why?"
"Because I think it has a nice classical sound; and it is here I come with my friends and discuss metaphysics."
"It seems to me you have a great many friends," I said.
"I was thinking," said Mrs. Fielden thoughtfully, "of adding another to their number."
"I have a constitutional dislike to worshipping in crowded temples," I said.