TheCompleteMemoirsOfGeorgeSherston

of the season. I couldn't afford to keep them even
if there had been room for them- all in Aunt Evelyn's
stable which there wasn't (two of them had been
put up in the village in the previous autumn).

Faced by the prospect of intensive economy in the
summer and with no apparent hope of another season
in the Midlands, my exodus from the Kennels meant
disconsolate exile from all newly discovered delights.
Even Denis had to admit this, but he had already
more than enough to occupy his mind. The Packle-
stone people, too, were so pleasant to me, and so
unaware of my inadequate resources, that I^was
frequently reminded of my forlorn future. Quite a
number of them would be going to London for the
season, or had houses there already, and when they
hoped to see something of me in the summer I felt
a very passable imitation of an impostor. Those
prosperous and well-appointed lives had no con-
nection with my economical future at Butley.

Nevertheless, I had visions of Mayfair in June, and
all the well-oiled ingredients of affluence and social
smartness, I saw myself sauntering about the sunlit
streets, well dressed and acquainted with plenty of
people with large houses in Berkeley, Grosvenor, or
Portman Squares, free to attend fashionable functions
and liberated from my previous provincialism. Fan-
tasias of polite society swept through me in.wave
on wave of secret snobbishness; life in London when
Hyde Park would be bright with flowers assumed the
enchanting aspect of a chapter in an elegantly written
novel about people with large incomes and aristo-
cratic connections. Sighing for such splendours, I
knew that I was only flattening my nose against the
plate-glass window of an expensive florist's shop.
Orchids were altogether beyond my income. I never
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